Sailesh Panchal, CTO at TSB Bank

Welcome to SettleMint’s newsletter, Chief Digital Heroes.?

Every week, we interview an expert leading the charge on all-things digital transformation at the world’s most innovative banks and financial institutions, then write up a summary of the top actionable lessons you can learn from them.?

In our latest edition, we dive into our interview with Sailesh Panchal , CTO at TSB Bank . Here are the top takeaways from the interview.?

1. How CTOs can help their teams do their best work

"There's a big movement now in terms of CTO, director of engineering are quite blurry in organizations. The bank at the moment is typically waterfall and we're going through a transition zone. The movement to create what we call agile architecture, evolutionary architecture, so that you provide the right guardrails for development teams to actually do what they want to do. The guardrails means making sure that your policies and your standards are clear.

“We want to move towards things like policy-as-code. So even the architects are thinking about how you're going to enforce policy, how you're going to manage risk and control frameworks through tools and observability, bringing all of that to life so that then when the engineering teams kick in, they've got very clear guidelines as to what they can and can't do, what's safe and not safe.

“Because any bank, you've got to make sure security is right there, data quality, data governance is through the process. Just because you're doing Agile teams, making sure the DevSecOps processes, you got your BDD, you've got your TDD, bringing test driven development into it, getting that quality discipline throughout that activity.

“The job of the CTO is to make sure all of those elements are there, the guardrails. And then the engineering directors can then actually just take and help the teams focus on delivery, which is what they're there to do."

Actionable Takeaway:

As a CTO, always be thinking about how you can empower your teams through better processes. Create guardrails and policies around how you develop new technology, which frees up development teams to focus on delivering their best work.

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2. How new technologies are providing more value for banking customers.

"We've all been through the blockchain over the last few years and there's some really good use cases and where you want that commonality of information, certainly in the mortgages space.

“Now, I think what we're really looking at is one, maximizing use of real cloud in the right way and I think the buzz is there around generative AI, but I've seen it can be massively productive, certainly in copilot mode, really enhancing a great developer experience, improving the workflow. Certainly things like testing can be massively improved.

“In terms of business benefit, that's really going to be the big needle that's going to change over the next few years and it really just unlocks giving our customers more, quicker. And that's what it's all about."

Actionable Takeaway:

Be eager to embrace new technologies like blockchain, cloud, and AI. Learn how they work and how they can improve your processes in order to provide more value for your customers.

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3. Why a CTO needs to know their business and their industry for better decision-making.

"Why is a CTO at Sibos? It's a payments conference, right? I've been coming since 2004-ish because you need to understand the business. You need to understand the pressure the business is under, what the trade-offs are, what kind of risk they're trying to deal with, what kind of issues the industry is trying to deal with. And within your institution, how can you prepare the organization?

“Because it's a strategy job. So effectively, the decisions you make today, the organization could have to live with for years and decades. So understanding those kinds of contexts is really important when you make those decisions or help business users who are less technically savvy, they rely on your advice to make that call because ultimately they don't know."

Actionable Takeaway:

Always be learning about your business and your industry — for example, by attending conferences like Sibos — in order to be a more effective decision maker for present and future impact.

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