Job Summary
Standard Chartered operates at enterprise scale across multiple markets in a regulated environment.
Technology and Operations (T&O) form 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 Performance and Reliability is responsible for driving operational excellence and enhanced commercial value through robust financial management, workforce optimization, and vendor governance. The incumbent ensures strong financial discipline across business-as-usual operations and incremental initiatives, while enabling strategic decision-making through insights, controls, and performance reviews
Key Responsibilities
• Provide ownership for GCIO wide end to end financial management, spanning BAU operations, incremental initiatives, and investment portfolios, ensuring disciplined allocation of funding aligned to strategic priorities and business outcomes.
• Lead rigorous forecasting and performance management, translating forecast versus actuals analysis into clear insights on variances, trends, and emerging risks to enable timely, data driven decisions by senior leadership.
• Drive delivery of financial commitments, including cost efficiency, value realization, and productivity gains, ensuring sustained performance against agreed targets across the portfolio.
• Establish strong Opex governance, proactively monitoring spend trajectories and ensuring business units operate within approved financial guardrails while maintaining operational effectiveness.
• Oversee vendor and license optimization, ensuring contracts are fully leveraged, usage is optimized, compliance is maintained, and financial leakage is minimized.
• Provide strategic headcount governance, balancing demand, affordability, and productivity across teams and geographies to support business growth and efficiency objectives.
• Partner with CIOs to define and execute a location strategy, enabling cost efficiency, scalability, resilience, and access to critical talent while mitigating operational and concentration risks.
• Partner with CIOs to optimize workforce mix and deployment, actively managing the balance of permanent staff, contractors, and outcome based models to meet evolving business needs with strong financial discipline.
• Chair and govern quarterly performance reviews, covering financial results, productivity, vendor performance, and progress against strategic initiatives, with clear accountability and follow through.
• Act as a strategic partner to Finance, Business COOs, and Supply Chain Management, driving alignment, integrated planning, and informed decision making across stakeholders.
• Enable delivery of FFG and Vantage outcomes, embedding strong financial and commercial levers into execution to support strategic transformation and long term value creation.
Strategy
• Partner with the COO and Group CIO to shape and evolve the GCIO strategy and multi year roadmap, ensuring strong alignment with Business and Technology & Operations strategy.
• 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 and 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 and 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, WRB
• CIO, DCCP,
• CIO, Trade & International Markets
• CIO, Group Functions
• HR Business Partner
• Corporate Affairs Branding & Marketing (CABM)
• Architecture Heads
• Business COOs
• SCM & Vendor Management teams
• Finance Business Partners
Our Ideal Candidate
Skills & Experience
• 15 Plus years of relevant experience in Banking domain
• Strong financial acumen with experience across forecasting, variance analysis, and investment governance
• Deep understanding of cost structures, Capex/Opex management, and commercial models
• Workforce and vendor optimization expertise
• Stakeholder management across Finance, Operations, and Supply Chain
• Ability to translate financial data into executive-level insights and actions
• 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
