HSBC has appointed Mike Warriner, a former engineering director at Google, as chief information officer for its retail banking and wealth management digital division.
Warriner joins the bank following a five-year stint at Google, where he led the search giant's Engineering site and AdSense Engineering. During this time he also acted as European Chairman of Google Payments Ltd. Warriner arrived at Google following a 19-year shift at UK banking tech house Intelligent Environments, where he rose to the rank of CTO.
He joins HSBC as the bank prepares to lavish $2.1 billion to tranform its legacy spaghetti architecture into a fit-for-digital business platform. Reporting to Ganesh Balasubramanian, global retail banking and wealth management CIO, Warriner will be focused on setting the bank's retail IT agenda.
"My focus has always been on the use of technology to delight users, whether a multi-player adventure game I wrote at school or more recently the complete re-write of Google’s main publisher advertising system," he says. “HSBC is an amazing brand, has great products and a highly capable global technology team. But even the strongest can’t sit still and the market is moving rapidly with new entrants taking advantage of mobile, artificial intelligence, chat bots and agile development."
In an effort to bring its systems up to scratch, HSBC has created a Technology Advisory Board of independent industry experts, including CEOs from Silicon Valley and venture capital companies, to advise on use of emerging technologies.