Job Summary

The Head of Digital Assets for China leads and ensures the competitive positioning of Standard Chartered Bank’s Digital Assets strategy across the China market. This person serves as a key strategic advisor and trusted partner to the China leadership teams and drives adoption and competence of Digital Assets (DA) within the China organisation. Based in Shanghai, the Head of Digital Assets, China will take ownership of executing global and local DA initiatives in China, fostering regulatory and industry engagement, and supporting client coverage in DA-related discussions.

Strategy
•    Value-Added Advisory: Provide expert guidance to country leadership teams, policymakers, and regulators as a subject matter expert on digital assets, with a focus on e-CNY, RWA tokenization, and stablecoin pilots relevant to China.
•    Work with individual DA initiative leads, the Global Head of Digital Assets and Digital Asset leads in other regions and business lines to support successful execution and delivery of approved DA portfolio initiatives in China in line with Group DA and Business Line DA strategy.

Business
•    Strategic Client Engagement: Identify market opportunities in China and prioritise initiatives with the highest potential commercial return. Build and maintain high-level relationships with clients, regulators, and industry leaders, moving beyond transactional interactions to become a consistent value-added partner. Engage on key digital asset trends.
•    Business Growth Initiatives: Collaborate across business lines and functions to deliver digital asset capabilities, including custody, trading, and tokenization solutions. Drive growth by assessing risks and ensuring market-leading returns. Enhance Standard Chartered’s position as the best provider of digital assets through thought leadership and broad engagement across China.
•    Stakeholder Relationships: Anticipate the needs of internal and external stakeholders, delivering tailored digital asset solutions. Partner with Technology and Operations to implement robust frameworks and infrastructure for DA initiatives.
•    Work with the Global Research team to connect with China stakeholders on relevant thematic thought leadership.

Key Responsibilities

Processes
•    Contribute ideas and use cases for the development of Digital Asset tools and processes for the group such as the Digital Asset Higher Risk Framework and Cryptoasset Assessment framework, particularly in relation to any local/regional dynamics. 

People & Talent
•    Drive support and collaboration for DA projects at all levels (senior and junior to you) and bring others on the DA journey, especially senior management in China. 
•    Simplify complicated ideas into actionable, measurable pieces and communicate those ideas to key stakeholders to generate buy-in.

Risk Management
•    Champion the development of tools and processes to support key risk and compliance stakeholders. 
•    Engage in constructive dialogue to ensure regulatory compliance and risk management in DA activities.
•    Where required, work with risk stakeholders to ensure appropriate (re)design of Country-level risk standards and processes to enable DA initiatives within the Bank.

Governance
•    Ensure ongoing reporting of relevant China-related risk and performance metrics and management intelligence to risk committees and other stakeholders.

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
•    China Management Team especially China CEO, China Heads of CIB and WRB and China ExCo
•    Global Head of CIB Platforms and Global Head of Digital Assets, plus other Regional and Functional Heads of Digital Assets
•    Digital Asset Initiative Leads across CIB, WRB and SCV
•    Group Digital Assets Risk, SCV Risk and China/Regional Chief Risk Officer
•    Principal Risk Type (PRT) Risk Framework Owners (RFOs) and the Digital Asset Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) within each PRT

Other Responsibilities
•    Embed Here for good and Group’s brand and values in the Digital Assets Centre of Excellence. Perform other responsibilities assigned under Group, Country, Business or Functional policies and procedures; Multiple functions (double hats).

Skills and Experience

•    Business Acumen
•    Business Analytics 
•    Business Process Design
•    Emerging Technologies
•    Planning: Tactical, Strategic
•    Product Risk Assessment & Management

Qualifications

Education    
•    Bachelor’s degree in finance, business, technology, or a related field.  
Training     
•    Excellent Presentation and PowerPoint skills 
•    Training/Familiarity with modern productivity tools, ADO, Teams, Slack, Trello, Mural, Jira, Confluence
Experience
•    Established track record of successful engagement with regulators in China, with comprehensive knowledge of the digital asset and crypto regulatory landscape.
•    Proven ability to build and maintain strong relationships with senior clients, regulators, and industry stakeholders in China.
•    Deep expertise in digital assets, including e-CNY, stablecoins, RWA tokenization, and blockchain technologies. Experience in fintech or Web3 is highly advantageous.
•    Demonstrated experience executing business plans and initiatives within high-growth financial services or fintech environments, with a focus on digital assets.
•    Demonstrable experience working across large groups of complex stakeholders preferably including risk teams and/or regulators.
Membership     
•    Active Membership (past or present) in FinTech or Digital Assets industry associations considered favourably.
Certifications     
•    Relevant blockchain certifications are required. 
•    Certifications in legal, compliance, or finance are highly regarded.
Languages     
•    Fluency in English and Mandarin is mandatory. Cantonese proficiency is an advantage.

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.