HSBC has appointed Ken Harvey as chief technology and services officer, a newly created position that combines the roles of chief operating officer (COO) and chief information officer (CIO).
Harvey - who is currently group CIO - will take on the combined role following the retirement of current group COO David Hodgkinson.
Harvey has been with HSBC since 1989, joining as assistant vice president of Canadian operations. In 1993 he was appointed global head of development and international operations before becoming CIO in 1997.
He will take up his new role on 1st October - reporting to group CEO Michael Geoghegan - and will also join the group management board.
Geoghegan says Harvey's appointment to the board reflects the importance the bank attaches to its current IT integration programme.
"By combining our technology and worldwide operations more closely we can re-engineer customers' experience of HSBC and at the same time drive down the unit cost of production," says Geoghegan.
Harvey will continue to lead the bank's One HSBC initiative which will see the migration of the bank's global operations onto a single technology platform. HSBC has said that the programme aims to "re-engineer the company so that wherever possible we use global systems" in a bid to drive down costs and improve customer service.
In August the bank said the programme is gathering momentum, with deployments in seven countries - Poland, Brunei, Australia, Russia, Chile, Indonesia and Slovakia - in the first half of 2008, with another seven countries slated to roll out the technology in the second half of the year.