The Capital Markets Company (Capco)
September 2010 - January 2016
London, UK
During my five and a half years at Capco I was exposed to projects in the private, investment and retail banking domains.
I also held leading roles on two multi-million pound IT transformation programs, including over three years as part of the digital transformation at Lloyds Banking Group.
Finally, I was also part of consulting teams engaged to conduct strategic reviews at Barclays, ABN AMRO and Cofunds.
Senior Project Manager,
Julius Baer International (JBInt)
June - October 2015
London, UK
I was hired to manage a Board sanctioned transformation initiative and was accountable to the COO. The strategic project was initiated to migrate discretionary client portfolios from one investment strategy to another. This involved working exclusively with front office relationship managers to understand clients in scope, analysing how they should be migrated and, managing the client communication process - a critical milestone being tracked by the Board of JBInt. Despite many challenges, the project was a success and achieved one of the simplification targets for the year.
Head of PMO,
Royal Bank of Scotland
January – June 2015
Edinburgh, Scotland
As part of a £30m IT transformation program initiated to enable API Integration for the bank and stand up a new strategic enterprise wide service platform, I was responsible for leading the PMO team. The remit of my role was to establish the function as the program ramped up and, to lead all associated activities. As part of my responsibilities on such a high profile program, I was also accountable for managing the overall finances and engaging with key program sponsors between London and Edinburgh.
Among my main achievements were:
1. Managing the PMO team including oversight of the production of all governance deliverables,
2. Overseeing the creation of a project plan spanning the entire program including the four key work streams,
3. Implementing an end to end finance reporting mechanism and managing the execution of the data collection process.
Business Process Review (BPR), Cofunds
October - December 2014
Essex, UK
Following the acquisition of Cofunds (a wealth management platform) by Legal and General, the acquisition synergy target for the IT & Operations directorate was at risk of not being achieved. Capco was asked to independently validate progress against meeting the forecast synergy benefit of £2m and suggest further process improvements. The output was a series of recommendations for the steering committee regarding the feasibility of the target and next steps for consideration.
Key achievements included:
1. Leading workshops with subject matter experts and analysing findings in order to identify business process re-engineering opportunities / cost savings across four business units,
2. Producing the delivery plan required for tracking and measuring these benefits.
Business Analyst,
UBS Investment Bank
May – September 2014
London, UK
In order to satisfy a requirement from the bank’s Swiss Regulator (FINMA), the segregation of user access rights to Core and Non-Core trading books across eighteen front office risk aggregation applications was required. My responsibility was to manage the client relationship and, the delivery of changes to five systems (user bases of 500-10,000). Key project stakeholders sat across business and IT directorates.
This involved:
1. Liaising with business application users in order to understand the changes required to remediate the access conflicts,
2. Designing the IT solution for implementation and working with application IT to get this delivered into production and then live environment,
3. Producing application closure packs and achieving group internal audit approval.
Scrum Master,
Lloyds Banking Group (LBG) Digital
November 2013 – April 2014
London, UK
I led two scrum teams within the IT Build and Test domain of the digital transformation program. One of the development teams was working to upgrade a version of the IBM WebSphere tool from 6.1 to 8.5 while the other team of developers were working on a project to write and deploy automated functional tests for all of the user journeys that customers navigate on the internet banking web page.
As scrum master, my responsibilities were to:
1. Co-ordinate and run the sprint planning and retrospective ceremonies that were held every two weeks,
2. Lead daily stand up calls, establish blockers / ensure the team were clear on tasks to be completed,
3. Communicate with business stakeholders to ensure that they were aligned with delivery of requirements.
Software Integration Manager, LBG Digital
April 2012 – October 2013
London, UK
As part of the large scale (£220M) digital transformation program, I was leading a team responsible for working with ten key ADM (Application Development and Maintenance) platforms in managing initiation of upcoming projects as part of the digital portfolio.
Specific responsibilities were to:
1. Build strong channels of communication with key stakeholders, thereby serving as the ADM Digital single point of contact,
2. Define the management information that characterised our engagement with donor platforms, including introducing service level agreements to track progress,
3. Build and automate our reporting by working with our development team to translate excel based documents into HTML,
4. Ensure the required resource uplift across ADM was achieved (following increased digital spend from £100m in 2012 to £220m in 2013).
Business Analyst - Target Operating Model Review,
LBG Digital
September 2011 – March 2012
London, UK
At the beginning of the digital transformation program, significant investment was allocated to deliver a build and test function that could accelerate the digitisation of all retail and commercial client journeys.
Before the portfolio of change was agreed, there was a need to substantiate which initiatives should be prioritised and how / when the technology estate should be upgraded. Output of the analysis I conducted highlighted the case for an end to end workflow tool, enhanced cross team collaboration and, environment and test strategy reviews. Ultimately, the analysis validated the assumption that elements of the agile framework would be critical in improving the efficiency of the release cycle and the frequency of the code deployments.
Due Diligence Analyst, Barclays Western European Integration
May 2011 – August 2011
Manchester, London - UK
As part of this engagement, we were charged with conducting a due diligence assessment of potential resource re-deployment opportunities. The output of this review would inform a decision regarding a possible wider program of change if opportunities existed. The areas subject to the review were application and development teams across the European Banking Retail Technology Divisions in France and Italy.
Among my responsibilities were to:
1. Document each country's ‘as is’ state in order to align them to the global operating model,
2. Consult with country leadership teams / European component leads to identify redeployment opportunities leveraging global utilities.
The findings were consolidated into a purpose built dashboard and served as inputs into the business case that was presented to our client.
Analyst, FX Transition Program,
Bank of America Merrill Lynch
February – May 2011
London, UK
Our client was delivering a critical Basel II Market Risk Consolidation requirement for the FX business, which, if not met, could have incurred millions in capital charges. Through my role, I helped to ensure the business had full visibility of emerging issues.
Key responsibilities included:
1. Analysing trades on a number of G10 books that were causing valuation breaks and preventing a G10 go-live,
2. Identifying currencies that could be ring-fenced and merged into the appropriate retail books.
Business Analyst - Private Banking Core Banking Platform Realisation
ABN AMRO
January – February 2011
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Our client was looking to make a strategic decision regarding the selection of a new Core Banking System (CBS). We were hired as a consultant team to provide an objective assessment and recommend the vendor that would be the best fit for the private bank, particularly given the group directive and specific product nuances.
Activities as part of my role included contributing to the creation of a functional map and subsequently aligning the bank's requirements with both core banking systems and vendor modules available.
The output of the project was a recommendation on which CBS vendor to pursue.