Role Summary

Corporate Real Estate & Services (CRES) is part of our Strategy and Talent (S&T) function. The CRES function manages a portfolio of nearly 1,200 buildings worldwide, spanning headquarter locations, branches, and offices across over 50 unique markets. CRES is a globally managed function, integrating individual country CRES teams, together with specialist groups covering Workplace, Asset Management, Technology, Data & Analytics and Sustainability.

The CRES function focuses on supporting the needs of the Group’s businesses, through managing a diverse portfolio and delivering superior services every day for the Group’s colleagues, clients and communities. Services provided by the function are broad in nature reflecting the key role that CRES plays across all Group businesses in its markets – spanning areas such as security, health and safety and wellness through to workplace experience and effectiveness, resiliency of data centres and delivery of the Group’s sustainability commitments. 

We are looking for a strategic and commercially minded Head, Portfolio Strategy and Planning, Office to help shape and deliver the Bank’s global office real estate portfolio strategy.

This role sits within Corporate Real Estate & Services, supporting a global portfolio across headquarters, branches and offices, and will play a key role in aligning real estate strategy with business growth, transformation, cost efficiency and colleague/client experience.

The successful candidate will work across a complex matrix organisation, partnering with CRES leadership, country and regional teams, supply partners and senior business stakeholders to develop forward-looking portfolio plans, identify opportunities and risks, and turn strategy into clear, actionable roadmaps.

Role Responsibilities

• Lead the development and delivery of the Bank’s office real estate portfolio strategy, ensuring alignment with business growth, transformation priorities and Group objectives.
• Drive strategic planning across the global portfolio, from high-level “plan on a page” outputs to detailed metro plans and multi-year portfolio roadmaps.
• Partner with CRES teams, country heads, relationship managers, supply partners and cross-functional SMEs to integrate business demand, space planning and portfolio optimisation into a cohesive strategy.
• Identify opportunities to optimise the real estate portfolio, improve colleague and client experience, support cost efficiency and enable targeted reinvestment in priority business areas.
• Lead and coordinate governance updates, portfolio reviews, steering committee materials, executive narratives, dashboards and insights to support senior decision-making.
• Facilitate cross-functional collaboration, de-conflict priorities, break down silos and drive clear decision-making across stakeholders.
• Lead formal reviews of strategy and planning outputs, ensuring alignment with portfolio strategy, business objectives, standards, principles, risk considerations and market best practice.
• Support value-driven prioritisation of projects and investments based on business impact, client outcomes, Corporate Plan contribution and transformation priorities.
• Manage risks across strategy delivery, ensuring key risks are identified, escalated and mitigated appropriately.
• Build strong stakeholder partnerships across business, functional leadership and the CRES Leadership Team, influencing decisions that create long-term value for the Bank.

Role Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree preferred, ideally in Real Estate, Finance, Engineering or another business-related discipline.
• Strong experience in banking, finance, project/programme management, real estate or corporate real estate, ideally with exposure to planning, design and delivery.
• Proven experience leading large-scale office transformation, portfolio planning or strategic real estate initiatives within a matrix organisation.
• Strong financial acumen, strategic thinking and ability to translate complex portfolio, business and market inputs into clear plans and executive-level narratives.
• Excellent stakeholder management and influencing skills, with the ability to engage senior leaders, country/regional teams, supply partners and cross-functional SMEs.
• Strong programme management capability, with an organised, action-oriented approach and ability to drive execution discipline across multiple workstreams.
• Demonstrated capability in business intelligence, analytics, effective communication, risk management, supply partner management, design/project management, lease and asset management.
• Ability to operate with ambiguity, make sound decisions, simplify ways of working and drive continuous improvement.
• Fluent English is required; additional languages would be advantageous.

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.