Managing vendors and IT teams during a major digital transformation is what Russ Thornton finds himself in the role of technical director at the British savings and loan Shawbrook bank.
It’s not new to him to bring together a large group of people with different skills and get them to cooperate. A musical conductor by training, Thornton “got caught up in computers to pay rent.”
In the early 1990s, he conducted orchestras in theaters in San Francisco, a city that he says “even in the early 1990s was expensive to rent.”
But he had another opportunity on his doorstep as the IT sector in and around the city grew rapidly. “I found myself pretty good with computers and ended up in Silicon Valley at the right time,” he told Computer Weekly.
After learning “a lot of knowledge” about IT in Silicon Valley, Thornton moved to the UK in 1997 to experience life abroad for a year. Today, married with two children, he is still here.
Over the past 25 years, he has since held tech positions at major banks and global consulting firms, and founded a couple of tech startups that he sold.
He said that his work with large orchestras in theaters is similar to his role as technical director. “I was a good musician, but I was never good at any instrument, but conducting is about bringing together a lot of people with great skills,” he said. “I’m good at many technologies, but I’m not good at one.”
He said that while he is unlikely to be hired as a senior developer, he is well prepared and has the skills to engage the team.
Making Music at Shawbrook
Branchless Shawbrook is a savings and loan specialist. It has a particular focus on the real estate sector, but provides services to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and consumers that are often underserved by the mainstream financial sector.
The bank was the result of the merger of five different financial companies in 2011. By 2017, after several years of growth, the owners decided to take the bank private and embarked on an IT transformation that Thornton was brought in to organize. the first technical director of the company. Shawbook now has 1200 employees after acquiring The Mortgage Lender in 2020.
Thornton said: “The owners saw that the company was growing really well, but the technology was everywhere, so I was invited.”
He said that this is an opportunity to create a new platform, define a technology strategy and begin the implementation of a multi-year transformation strategy.
The first task was to transform the IT department itself. “In the first few years that I was here, we spent a lot of time building a modern technology feature rather than the old school we had. We have moved from a cloud-over-my-dead-body strategy to a cloud-first policy, and we have invested heavily in cybersecurity, infrastructure, and productivity tools,” he added.
The early investment made was timely given the disruption that occurred a couple of years later when the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted the current global business model. The investment “saved the bank’s bacon” during the Covid-19 pandemic, Thornton said, because the company “suddenly went from 900 people working in an office to 900 people working from home within two weeks.”
Five pillars of IT
But Thornton focused on the long term: when he joined the bank in 2018, he set five key goals for himself. These were: the introduction of a modern IT model, the transition to cloud technologies, ensuring cybersecurity, using data and writing software. house.
The technology department itself was the first. Thornton said, “The technology model was completely destroyed by a very old operation-based model from the 1990s.” He presented a model more like fintech. He then created an in-house cloud engineering service, which he said was “a major part of the job.”
A Chief of Information Security was also appointed to ensure the relevance of information security. The bank then laid the groundwork for a cloud-based data lake to “look at analytics in a much more positive way, and the last part was writing our own software.”
“Technology used to be a secondary part of our strategy, but now it is completely at the core”
Russ Thornton, Showbrook
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Thornton said of the final snippet, “We were a bank that was afraid to write our own software, but we quickly realized that we could write our own customer service software.”
Perhaps the most significant decision was made in 2018, when the owners decided to invest in IT. “Technology used to be a secondary part of our strategy, but now it is completely at the core,” Thornton said.
He said today that the company wants its employees, who are skilled in the highly complex and specialized part of financial services, to have the technology they need to work more efficiently.
“Our strategy is to combine our deep human experience with cutting-edge technology and data. We keep the human element because we play in complex markets, but we want specialists to have the right technology and data so that they can make decisions quickly,” he said.
Shawbrook has about 110 full-time IT professionals and about 70 IT vendors who work for the bank and are “part of the team,” according to Thornton.
“I need a balance between full-time staff and supplier staff. The 60:40 balance works great with a stable base of employees at the top levels, complemented by supplier staff to help make deliveries.”
Thornton recently oversaw a business process software rewrite and customer experience automation for part of its lending business, using a low-code technology platform that is already saving 1,500 hours a month as a result.
Now he plans to digitize the processes in his savings business to reduce the time it takes for clients to open an account and make deposits.
