CIO interview: Russ Thornton, chief technology officer at Shawbrook Bank
Orchestrating suppliers and IT groups throughout a significant digital transformation is what Russ Thornton finds himself doing in his function as CTO at UK lending and financial savings financial institution Shawbrook.
Bringing a big group of individuals with completely different abilities collectively and making them collaborate just isn’t new to him. A musical conductor by training, Thornton “fell into computers to pay the rent”.
In the early Nineteen Nineties, he was conducting orchestras in theatres in San Francisco, a metropolis which he says, “even in the early 1990s was an expensive place to rent”.
But on his doorstep was one other alternative because the IT sector in and across the metropolis grew quickly. “I found I was quite good with computers and was in Silicon Valley at the right time,” he informed Computer Weekly.
After studying “a bucket load” about IT in Silicon Valley, Thornton moved to the UK in 1997 to expertise life overseas for a yr. Today, married with two youngsters, he’s nonetheless right here.
In the previous 25 years, he has since held technology roles at large banks and world consultancies and has established a few tech startups which he has offered.
He stated his job conducting giant orchestras in theatres is analogous to his function as a CTO. “I was a good musician, but never great at any one instrument, but conducting is about bringing lots of people with great skills together,” he stated. “I am good at a lot of tech, but not great at a single tech.”
He stated that whereas he could be unlikely to be employed as a senior developer, he’s properly rounded, with the abilities wanted to convey a group alongside.
Making music at Shawbrook
Branchless Shawbrook financial institution is a specialist financial savings and lending financial institution. It has a selected deal with the property sector however offers providers to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and customers which are usually underserved by the mainstream finance sector.
The financial institution was the results of the approaching collectively of 5 completely different finance companies in 2011. By 2017, after years of progress, the homeowners determined to take the financial institution into non-public fingers and launched into an IT transformation, which Thornton was introduced on to orchestrate as the corporate’s first ever CTO. Shawbook now has 1,200 workers after buying The Mortgage Lender in 2020.
Thornton stated: “The owners could see the company was growing really well, but the technology was all over the place, so I was brought in.”
He stated it was a possibility to have a greenfield website, set the technology technique and set off on a multi-year transformation technique.
The first job was to rework the IT division itself. “For the first few years I was here, we spent a lot of time creating a modern technology function rather than the old school one we had. We went from a ‘cloud over my dead body’ strategy to a cloud-first policy, we invested heavily in cyber, infrastructure and productivity tools,” he added.
The early investments made have been well timed given the disruption that emerged a few years later when the Covid-19 pandemic ripped up the working mannequin of the world’s companies. These investments “saved the bank’s bacon” throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, stated Thornton, as a result of the corporate “suddenly went from having 900 people working in the office to 900 people working from home within two weeks”.
Five pillars of IT
But Thornton was targeted on the long run, with 5 key pillars set out when he joined the financial institution in 2018. These have been: introducing a contemporary IT mannequin, changing into cloud first, getting on high of cyber safety, harnessing knowledge and writing software program in-house.
The technology division itself was the primary. Thornton stated: “The technology model was completely broken with a really old school 1990s operations-led model.” He introduced in a mannequin extra like that of a fintech. He then established an in-house cloud engineering perform, which he stated was “a major piece of work”.
The appointment of a chief info safety officer was additionally made to get infosec updated. The financial institution then put within the foundations for a cloud-based knowledge lake to “look at analytics much more positively, and the final piece was around writing our own software”.
“Technology used to be a side part of our strategy, but now it is absolutely at the core”
Russ Thornton, Shawbrook
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Thornton stated of the ultimate piece: “We were a bank that was afraid of writing our own software, but we quickly realised we can write our own software to deliver customer experiences.”
Perhaps essentially the most vital determination was made in 2018 when the homeowners determined to put money into IT. “Technology used to be a side part of our strategy, but now it is absolutely at the core,” stated Thornton.
Today, he stated the corporate desires to make sure its workers, who’re expert in a really advanced and specialist a part of monetary providers, have the tech they should do issues extra effectively.
“Our strategy revolves around combining our deep human expertise with leading edge tech and data. We retain the human element, because we play in complicated markets, but we want specialists to have the right technology and data around them to make decisions quickly,” he stated.
Shawbrook has round 110 full-time IT workers and round 70 by means of its IT suppliers who’re outsourced to the financial institution and “part of the team”, in accordance with Thornton.
“For me, there needs to be a balance between full-time staff and those from suppliers. A 60:40 balance works nicely with a stable base of staff at the top layers augmented by staff from suppliers to help make delivery happen.”
Thornton not too long ago oversaw the rewrite enterprise course of software program and automate buyer journeys in a part of its loans enterprise, utilizing low code technology platform which is already saving 1,500 hours a month in consequence.
It now plans to digitise processes in its financial savings enterprise to hurry up the time it takes prospects to open an account and make deposits.
