I joined Standard Chartered 6 years ago as the opportunity and scale of work were a perfect fit for my aspirations at that point of time. It felt like a culmination of all my previous experiences into a single highly challenging and fruitful role.
Can you tell us about your role and the projects you’re involved in?
I work on multiple exciting projects that
ensure the bank always have funds to pay all stakeholders on time every time, even through bad times
monitor income sensitivity under various interest rate scenarios
determine internal pricing between business units, which ultimately helps the bank to provide competitive rates to our customers.
What’s your proudest achievement since joining the Bank
I have positively contributed to the careers of more than 100 colleagues within the past 5 years – helping people to grow and realise their aspirations, while delivering on organisational outcomes.
What do you love most about your role?
I love that my line manager had trusted me to wear several hats through the past 6 years without needing to change my job, including IT BA lead, tech lead, solution chapter lead, solutions architect, engineering lead, location lead, cost centre owner, working group representatives and most recently, FTP Hive Tech Lead.
What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far in your role?
The greatest challenge is time. With enough time, every challenge will not be a challenge. Therefore, exercise is important to stay healthy and energetic even as we grow wiser so that we get the most out of every second.
How would you describe the culture in your team?
There are location-specific nuances across India, Singapore and Poland. The commonality is that every location is very friendly and new joiners will feel included very fast. We put people first, so that people take care of everything else.
What would you say to someone thinking about joining Standard Chartered?
As a bank, we have a stronger control and governance environment. Putting that aside, Standard Chartered will be one of the best places you can have a career, with multiple opportunities for those who strives for it.
Marriage encouraged by colleagues
We had a close-knitted team that felt so comfortable openly expressing their opinions, including on our personal lives. It was an eventful birthday party in 2019 that my team members brought up that there were ‘sparks’ between me and my now wife. I still recall vividly that the moment we started dating, I brought my line manager into the room and declared our close personal relationship. Thankfully, my line manager gave me his blessings really fast too.
Fast forward few years, my team members were right and I was lucky to have taken their advice, marrying an awesome lady and being blessed with two more kids. I can only thank my team for their strong convictions because I would never have imagined trying to ask a colleague out.
Increased responsibilities with promotion
2020 was definitely a significant milestone in my career where I interacted with increasingly senior stakeholders as a solutions architect, leading in technology strategy across liquidity risk, interest rate risk banking book and funds transfer pricing. I also got a promotion in the same year, leading more team members than I ever had and stepping up to challenges in managing greater numbers of stakeholders and responsibilities.
Poland liquidity technology lead
In 2021, due to a leaving colleague, I took the opportunity to take on a concurrent role leading a team of Poland developers and drive the success of Poland as a location. It was truly a pivotal moment of my career, having to juggle two full time roles and it was actually a blessing that the roles were based in different time zones as I could play both my Singapore and Poland role without compromising the other.
It was also a great opportunity to learn increased effective delegation and seeing my team mates step up significantly in their careers. At the same time, I had to get closer towards all technical details, helping massively in my understanding of technology processes to a greater detail, which helps me perform better as a solutions architect too.
This was definitely one of the most challenging period of my career, navigating cultural differences, deep-dive technology details, managing more stakeholders, leading 60+ resources concurrently and coping with all these challenges at the same time definitely helped me grow significantly as a technology leader.
Short Term Assignment in Poland
The highlight of my career with Standard Chartered is definitely the physical relocation to Poland and building the leadership pipeline in Poland. My physical relocation was relatively smooth with the amount of rapport built with the team and it felt like just a second home to me. The colleagues in the office were both professional at work and great buddies outside of work, who helped in my all-round development.
Outside of work, they taught me the importance of family and well-being.
Within work, it was great to learn new things from my colleagues all the time from bigger things like security design and even the nitty gritty things like using of multiple desktops, which evolved the way I worked.
It was also a great privilege to be part of a growing hub, where we participate in local leadership forums and planning/ participating in big events. This exposure was truly eye-opening that I would not have believed how much could be gained within a year without having gone through it myself.
To top it off, I am glad that my short term assignment was declared as a success from both mine as well as the organization’s perspective. It was so good that at the midway checkpoint of the assignment, my line manager had already opined that the objectives of the assignment had been met, including global integration, development of permanent successor and next level leadership, massive improvements in employee satisfaction and ending the assignment with almost double the team size I initially took over.
Interested in joining us?
If you’re looking for a career with purpose and want to work for a bank making a difference, we’d love to hear from you.
