Banking Automation Portfolio Rationalisation Director

The mandate

The bank has accumulated more than six hundred robotic, workflow and low-code automations, many supported from India but sponsored by individuals who have moved roles. Similar processes carry different credentials and exception logic, while savings reports ignore monitoring and break-fix effort. The board wants a defensible portfolio design before approving generative automation and another platform migration.

The five-month deliverable comprises a risk-and-value taxonomy, rationalised portfolio and operating design for five automation families. Milestone one establishes ownership and failure exposure by week five; milestone two determines consolidate, rebuild, retain and retire rules in month two; milestone three exercises three failure chains in month four; milestone four delivers decisions, economics and transition artefacts.

The client will provide automation inventories, credential maps, incident and exception records, process volumes, control assessments, platform contracts, support effort and named business owners. Acceptance requires the council to disposition fifty representative automations and approve recovery plans for three cross-process failures. India leaders must defend at least two retirement or consolidation recommendations using traceable evidence.

The project excludes changing live payment or lending processes, rotating production credentials, selecting an automation platform, implementing retirements and issuing audit opinions. Consultants can recommend action and define control evidence but cannot deactivate a bot or accept operational risk. Testing uses client-created replicas or historical records inside controlled environments.

Editable outputs include automation-product envelopes, ownership tests, credential patterns, failure-chain maps, lifecycle gates, value calculations and a portfolio decision queue. Client analysts will classify an unseen sample during the final workshop to prove transfer. Implementation waves and generative-AI deployment are separately governed and cannot delay acceptance of the rationalisation design.

Why this is external work

Business sponsors defend local efficiency, platform teams protect preferred tools and India support groups are rewarded for keeping automations running. No incumbent owner benefits from exposing duplicate controls or recommending retirement. Independent banking-automation expertise can reconstruct real lifecycle cost and risk without controlling live processes.

What you will own

• Reconcile automation inventories with business owners, credentials, platforms, control points, exceptions, incidents and support effort.
• Group scripts, robots and workflows into capability products with coherent outcomes and accountable lifecycle owners.
• Define retain, consolidate, rebuild, migrate and retire tests using risk, value, fragility and strategic fit.
• Map failure chains where several automations reuse data, identities, queues or compensating manual controls.
• Establish India ownership for engineering quality, monitoring, recovery, evidence and technical retirement recommendations.
• Exercise credential expiry, schema change and process-exception scenarios across three representative automation chains.
• Deliver disposition queue, product envelopes, control requirements, economics, transition sequence and unresolved ownership decisions.

Candidate qualifications

• Rationalised a regulated bank’s large automation estate spanning robotics, workflow, low-code and business-owned scripts.
• Exposed lifecycle cost, credential risk and exception handling that had been omitted from automation benefit cases.
• Consolidated or retired politically protected automations without interrupting critical payment, lending or finance processes.
• Built India automation-product leadership accountable for engineering, monitoring and recovery rather than ticket resolution.
• Mapped correlated failure across identities, data changes, queues and manual controls before selecting remediation.
• Delivered a repeatable portfolio method accepted by operations, risk, audit and technology leaders.

Non-negotiables

• Can complete two India residencies and all four Frankfurt portfolio milestones within five months.
• Will disclose bank, automation-platform, low-code, audit, consulting and systems-integration relationships.
• Brings banking automation rationalisation with live control evidence; platform migration strategy alone is insufficient.
• Accepts no production-change authority and council disposition of representative cases as final acceptance.

1. 49 words maximum. Describe an automation you retired after its hidden control and support cost erased claimed savings.
2. 49 words maximum. Which correlated failure would you test before consolidating business-owned bots into one product?
3. 49 words maximum. What inventory and credential evidence must the bank provide before classification begins?