Standard Chartered’s latest Singapore MD comes from Boston Consulting

Standard Chartered has appointed Douglas Jackson as a Singapore-based managing director for group strategy. Jackson joined Stan Chart, which makes about two-thirds of its profits from Asia, earlier this month from Bosting Consulting Group, where he worked for more than 10 years, latterly as a senior advisor in Ho Chi Minh City.

His move suggests that Standard Chartered is still fond of bringing in senior strategists from top global consulting firms, and basing them in Singapore, where many of its group heads are located. The bank declined to comment.

Last year Stan Chart poached Pierre Paoli, also from BCG, as head of its strategic initiatives unit for commercial and institutional banking, and hired IBM consultant Sushil Anand as head of computational and digital advisory for wealth management. It also took on Christopher Williams (ex-Deloitte and UBS) as global head of strategy, governance and change for technology services. 

Stan Chart’s recruitment of consultants has been partly triggered by its restructuring drives, which have been ongoing in various guises since 2015, when Bill Winters became CEO. Third quarter results from Stan Chart – in which profits rose 16% year-on-year following about four years of cuts to jobs and other costs – were hailed as proof that Winter’s turnaround strategy is starting to bear fruit.

The bank’s latest consultant hire, Jackson, joined BCG in 2008 as a senior consultant, specialising in corporate strategy, risk management and organisational transformation, according to his LinkedIn profile. The following year he did a brief secondment as executive deputy general director for Vietnam International Bank, before returning to BCG full time in 2010 as a partner and head of the Vietnam office.

Jackson started his career in 1989 as an information officer at Bank of Montreal in Taipei and he then worked for JP Morgan in Seattle (1991 to 1996) and A.T. Kearney in Thailand (1998 to 2008, following his Columbia Business School MBA).

Photo by Shawnn Tan on Unsplash

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