Job Summary
Standard Chartered operates at enterprise scale across multiple markets in a regulated environment.
Technology and Operations (T&O) forms the core of our Bank-wide initiatives aimed at simplifying, standardising, and digitising processes. These foundational elements are essential in advancing our client-centric, data-driven digital banking model, and play a pivotal role in enabling the successful execution of the Bank’s Cross Border and Affluent Strategy. The Group CIO (GCIO) organisation, operating within T&O, oversees application management across Wealth and Retail Banking, Trade, Digital Channels and Coverage Platforms—including Financial Security Services and Business Banking—Group Functions (Risk, Legal, Audit, Strategy and Talent), as well as Country-specific applications.
The COO function within GCIO is tasked with driving the Vision and Strategy across GCIO, ensuring alignment with T&O and Bank’s overarching strategy. They also provide governance over financials, vendor management, risk, and cross-departmental programmes that are critical to the success of GCIO.
The Head of Simplification and Optimisation is responsible for identifying and implementing opportunities to streamline and enhance processes within the GCIO organisation. The goal is to ensure that the business operates efficiently and effectively, supporting the broader objectives of Technology and Operations as well as the Bank’s client-centric, data-driven digital banking model.
Key Responsibilities
• Design and lead simplification initiatives to improve the productivity, effectiveness, and operating rhythm of the Group CIO function, creating efficiencies, simplifying workflows and removing structural complexity.
• Act as the primary interface across CIO Business Management teams, ensuring alignment of priorities, consistent execution, and strong collaboration across all CIO units.
• Oversee GCIO planning and execution support, providing ongoing oversight to ensure strategic priorities and key initiatives are delivered effectively.
• Sponsor learning and capability initiatives that build critical skills, strengthen leadership capability, and support the long term development of GCIO colleagues.
• Lead communication initiatives and project support, ensuring clear, consistent, and effective messaging across the Group CIO function.
• Plan and deliver engagement activities that strengthen connectivity, collaboration, and alignment across teams and locations.
• Own and drive the My Voice agenda, embedding structured mechanisms for employee feedback and ensuring insights inform cultural and organisational improvement.
• Support the set up of townhalls and all hands forums, enabling open dialogue, transparency, and consistent leadership communication across all GCIO locations.
• Champion culture uplift initiatives, strengthening engagement, accountability, and a high performance culture across the global GCIO organisation.
• Partner closely with GCIO leadership, the GCIO COO leadership, HR, Talent & Learning, and Project teams to ensure optimisation, simplification, and engagement initiatives are aligned, well governed, and collectively deliver impact for the function.
Strategy
• Partner with the COO and Group CIO to shape and support targeted bank wide strategic initiatives such as Phoenix
• Support innovation and drive the GCIO transformation agenda, with the objective of positioning the Bank as a leading digital institution.
• Contribute to the definition of the digital agenda, including the commercialisation of innovative uses of technology to deliver tangible business value.
• Drive strategic initiatives to streamline processes, enhance productivity, reduce risk, and strengthen controls, leveraging technology and digital capabilities to deliver sustainable outcomes.
Processes
• Own the end to end solutioning lifecycle for GCIOs, ensuring business needs are translated into effective, well governed solutions that deliver intended outcomes.
• Ensure compliance with required processes and governance frameworks, providing assurance that objectives are delivered in line with policy, risk, and control expectations.
• Drive adoption of best practices, technology standards, and delivery methodologies, embedding consistency, quality, and scalability across the GCIO organisation.
People & Talent
• Attract, develop, and retain high quality talent to deliver improved service and outcomes for CIO units.
• Lead by example and role model desired culture and values, setting clear expectations and working closely with Risk and Control partners to reinforce strong conduct and governance.
• Ensure ongoing training, development, and effective supervision, confirming that direct reports are appropriately skilled, qualified, and supported to mitigate operational and people related risks.
• Establish and maintain succession plans for critical roles, ensuring continuity, resilience, and leadership depth across the organisation.
• Set clear job descriptions and performance objectives for direct reports, providing regular feedback, performance assessment, and recognition aligned to delivery against agreed responsibilities.
• Create a motivating and high performance environment, fostering creativity, accountability, and customer centric thinking while enabling teams to perform at their best.
Risk Management
• Proactively seek regular assurance that the domain is operating within acceptable risk and control standards.
• Act decisively on emerging risk or control weaknesses, ensuring issues are remediated within agreed timeframes and appropriately escalated through relevant governance forums and committees.
• Assume risk and control ownership when required, in line with the Group’s risk management framework and at the appropriate level of accountability.
• Ensure all internal, legal, and regulatory controls are embedded within the development of segment and product requirements.
• Balance business performance and cost management objectives with risk and control considerations, ensuring outcomes remain within the Group’s risk appetite and do not materially expose the organisation.
Governance
• Attend and represent the function at relevant councils and governance forums, ensuring GCIO units operate in line with required standards and obligations.
• Embed the Group’s Values and Code of Conduct across the domain, reinforcing a culture of ethical behaviour, compliance, and adherence to policies, processes, and regulations.
• Ensure compliance with all relevant Standard Chartered governance frameworks, including direct obligations and any downstream impacts arising from team activities.
• Uphold the highest standards of regulatory and business conduct, ensuring consistent compliance with internal policies and external regulatory requirements.
Regulatory & Business Conduct
• Display exemplary conduct and live by the Group’s Values and Code of Conduct.
• Take personal responsibility for embedding the highest standards of ethics, including regulatory and business conduct, across Standard Chartered Bank. This includes understanding and ensuring compliance with, in letter and spirit, all applicable laws, regulations, guidelines and the Group Code of Conduct.
• Effectively and collaboratively identify, escalate, mitigate and resolve risk, conduct and compliance matters.
Key stakeholders
• Group CIO
• CIO COO Team
• T&O Risk and Governance
• CIO, WRB
• CIO, Platforms Technology
• CIO, Trade & International Markets
• CIO, Group Functions
• HR Business Partner
• Corporate Affairs Branding & Marketing (CABM)
Our Ideal Candidate
Skills & Experience
• 15 Plus years of relevant experience in Banking domain
• Extensive leadership experience in delivering large scale process optimisation initiatives and managing financial performance.
• Strong business and financial acumen, with a proven ability to develop and articulate compelling business cases for process and efficiency improvements.
• Strong working knowledge of Lean, Six Sigma, or Total Quality Management (TQM) principles and their application in complex organisations.
• Programme or project management experience within large, multi stakeholder environments is advantageous.
• Deep expertise in technology side commercial and contract governance, including vendor renewals, performance management, consolidation strategies, and value realisation.
• Experience with ITIL, Agile and Lean delivery models, and exposure to risk, control, or vendor governance frameworks is preferred.
Qualifications
• Graduate degree in Business and/or Technology, with a strong foundation in enterprise operations and digital delivery.
Role Specific Technical Competencies
• Technology Experience
• Business Architecture
• Strategy
• Delivery
• Portfolio management
• Stakeholder Influence
About Standard Chartered
We're an international bank, nimble enough to act, big enough for impact. For more than 170 years, we've worked to make a positive difference for our clients, communities, and each other. We question the status quo, love a challenge and enjoy finding new opportunities to grow and do better than before. If you're looking for a career with purpose and you want to work for a bank making a difference, we want to hear from you. You can count on us to celebrate your unique talents and we can't wait to see the talents you can bring us.
Our purpose, to drive commerce and prosperity through our unique diversity, together with our brand promise, to be here for good are achieved by how we each live our valued behaviours. When you work with us, you'll see how we value difference and advocate inclusion.
Together we:
• Do the right thing and are assertive, challenge one another, and live with integrity, while putting the client at the heart of what we do
• Never settle, continuously striving to improve and innovate, keeping things simple and learning from doing well, and not so well
• Are better together, we can be ourselves, be inclusive, see more good in others, and work collectively to build for the long term
What we offer
In line with our Fair Pay Charter, we offer a competitive salary and benefits to support your mental, physical, financial and social wellbeing.
• Core bank funding for retirement savings, medical and life insurance, with flexible and voluntary benefits available in some locations.
• Time-off including annual leave, parental/maternity (20 weeks), sabbatical (12 months maximum) and volunteering leave (3 days), along with minimum global standards for annual and public holiday, which is combined to 30 days minimum.
• Flexible working options based around home and office locations, with flexible working patterns.
• Proactive wellbeing support through Unmind, a market-leading digital wellbeing platform, development courses for resilience and other human skills, global Employee Assistance Programme, sick leave, mental health first-aiders and all sorts of self-help toolkits
• A continuous learning culture to support your growth, with opportunities to reskill and upskill and access to physical, virtual and digital learning.
• Being part of an inclusive and values driven organisation, one that embraces and celebrates our unique diversity, across our teams, business functions and geographies - everyone feels respected and can realise their full potential.
Recruitment Assessments
Some of our roles use assessments to help us understand how suitable you are for the role you've applied to. If you are invited to take an assessment, this is great news. It means your application has progressed to an important stage of our recruitment process.
Visit our careers website www.sc.com/careers
