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 are 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 Risk Excellence is accountable for proactive and integrated risk management across the GCIO portfolio, ensuring risks are identified early, governed effectively, and managed through clear ownership and decision-ready insights. The role strengthens risk and audit readiness, uplifts governance discipline, and drives a shift from reactive remediation to preventative risk management, enabling informed executive decision-making.
Key Responsibilities
- Actively manage the GCIO risk landscape by establishing clear accountabilities, ownership, and escalation pathways that support timely and informed decision-making at senior forums.
- Drive a forward-looking risk agenda by identifying emerging risks, systemic patterns, and control weaknesses, ensuring preventative actions are prioritised over reactive remediation.
- Own and maintain the GCIO Risk Roadmap, aligning risk priorities with strategic objectives, regulatory expectations, and technology transformation outcomes.
- Ensure ongoing readiness for Risk and Audit forums, including the quality, accuracy, and completeness of risk papers, dashboards, and supporting materials.
- Uplift the discipline, cadence, and effectiveness of Risk forums by standardising governance artefacts, improving narrative clarity, and ensuring actionable outcomes are tracked to closure.
- Provide subject-matter leadership in risk discussions, enabling constructive challenge and evidence-based decisions.
- Provide governance oversight for Risk Committees and regulatory-facing forums, ensuring alignment with enterprise risk frameworks, policies, and regulatory obligations.
- Ensure risk management practices demonstrate defensibility, consistency, and traceability, particularly in areas of regulatory scrutiny and audit focus.
- Act as a trusted interface between GCIO leadership and enterprise risk functions on governance matters.
- Drive delivery of Audit commitments, ensuring findings are clearly owned, remediation plans are realistic, and milestones are actively tracked to closure.
- Proactively engage stakeholders to address root causes of audit issues, reducing repeat findings and strengthening the overall control environment.
- Monitor audit themes and outcomes to inform risk prioritisation and governance improvements.
- Lead and oversee Vulnerability and Obsolescence management plans, ensuring technology and operational risks are identified, prioritised, and addressed in line with risk appetite.
- Drive the active management of open risks and issues, ensuring accurate status reporting, timely escalation, and effective mitigation actions.
- Ensure interdependencies across risks, vulnerabilities, and issues are understood and managed holistically.
- Collate and apply lessons learnt from incidents, audits, and risk events, embedding improvements into governance processes, standards, and ways of working.
- Analyse trends and patterns across risk and issue data to provide insights that inform preventative controls, strategic investment decisions, and operating model changes.
- Promote a strong risk culture by reinforcing accountability, transparency, and learning across the GCIO organisation.
- Partner closely with Risk, Technology & Operations Risk and Governance, and Cyber teams to ensure aligned risk practices and a cohesive control environment.
- Build strong relationships with senior GCIO leaders, enabling effective challenge, advice, and support on risk-related matters.
- Influence outcomes across multiple teams and domains without direct authority, leveraging expertise and credibility.
Strategy
- Partner with the COO and Group CIO to shape and evolve the GCIO risk strategy roadmap, ensuring strong alignment with Business and Technology & Operations strategy.
- 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
- Architecture Heads
- T&O Risk and Governance Teams
- Business Risk & Governance Teams
- CEO Offices for NFRC papers
Our Ideal Candidate
- Extensive operational risk management experience, with over 15 years in banking and financial services.
- Preferred certifications include CRISC, CISA, or similar qualifications in risk management.
- Demonstrated business and risk acumen, with a strong track record of developing and communicating effective mitigation strategies.
- Thorough understanding of the Bank’s operational risk management framework or equivalent experience within comparable organizations.
- Exhibits sound judgment and the resolve required to fulfill control responsibilities, fostering productive professional relationships.
- Excellent verbal and written communication abilities.
- Skilled at conveying complex risk matters to both senior leaders and non-technical stakeholders.
- Outstanding interpersonal skills, including multicultural awareness and sensitivity.
- Proactive approach to risk management.
Qualifications
- Relevant degree qualification required
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
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