Standard Chartered hires global chief architect from Amazon

Standard Chartered has appointed Brendan Royal as its Singapore-based global chief architect. Royal joined earlier this month from Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Sydney, where he spent four years as a senior manager, solution architecture, according to his LinkedIn profile.

In November 2020, AWS announced a five-year global agreement with Standard Chartered, including the bank running its strategic banking systems and customer facing applications on AWS. But as banks partner up with cloud platforms like AWS, they are increasingly also hiring from these same providers. In June, Carl Bachman Kharazmi moved to Stan Chart as managing director and global head of cloud engineering and platforms, having been Google’s Singapore-based cloud engineering lead.

Other banks in Singapore are hiring from cloud platforms, especially AWS, which has a large presence in the Republic. Ravi Bhateja, a cloud engineer at JP Morgan, also comes from AWS, for example.

Moving from the likes of AWS to a bank is not as surprising a career move as it may seem, Adrian Yuen, managing consultant in the technology team at Hudson, told us previously. “At a cloud provider, you could be a part of the implementation and even the enterprise customer support side. But after moving into a large bank you would have significant influence in key decision making and be heavily involved in the full end-to-end delivery and migration of the cloud services,” he added.

At cloud providers, technologists are also required to interact with sales teams and talk directly with clients to come up with solutions to business problems. Jobs at banks tend to be more focused on dealing with other teams within the business.

Royal worked for CBA between 1999 and 2013, latterly as head of retail and business banking architecture. He then held senior roles at Macquarie and Nordea.