ING chief moves to one of Standard Chartered’s most interesting jobs

Aniruddha Paul, ING’s chief data officer, has joined Standard Chartered as global head of enterprise transformation.

Paul, who specialises in “transforming businesses using code, data and process”, moved to Stan Chart earlier this month, according to his LinkedIn profile. He relocated from the Netherlands to Singapore in the process. Stan Chart bases many of its global leadership roles, including transformation ones, in the Republic.

Paul was with ING for about five years and initially joined as CIO of its Australian operations. Prior to that he held several senior technology and transformation roles in the Indian financial sector.

Standard Chartered is not the only bank which has been hiring senior transformation specialists in Singapore.

In January, Rusli Ang joined DBS as an executive director and head of Singapore digital technology and transformation. His hire followed that of Imran Zaffar who moved to OCBC from McKinsey as head of agile transformation.

People with transformation expertise are in strong demand in the banking sector in Singapore and globally as established financial institutions boost their tech budgets and look to innovate in the face of competition from fintechs. HSBC wants to “digitise at scale” as a core pillar of its new strategy, for example.

Standard Chartered, DBS, OCBC and UOB – as banks that largely execute their digital strategies out of Singapore – are particularly strong recruiters in the transformation space.

But there’s a limited talent pool of people with the right combination of business expertise and technical knowledge to fill transformation roles, which has created a merry-go-round of talent as people are poached from rival banks and from consultancies. As we’ve reported, banks can find it hard to retain their digital transformation specialists, who complain that they’re hindered by bureaucracy and are sidelined by existing business owners.

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