Everything we do now always has a very strong technology aspect.
A month into her position as Westpac’s latest CTO, Yianna Papanikolaou what’s making transformation more important right now is that technology is moving fast, fuelling innovation, and changing consumers’ expectations quicker than in the past.
In an interview with Westpac Wire, Papanikolaou said “banks need to be able to adapt to those faster, and on an ongoing basis, and to do that, we need to build that muscle. Chief transformation officers help achieve that.”
“If we look historically, banks have always needed to… materially transform the way they’ve done business over the years,” said Papanikolaou to the publication.
Papanikolaou, officially stepped into the newly created role of chief transformation officer in Westpac’s executive team.
Previously she headed up strategy and transformation for Royal Bank of Scotland’s corporate bank, after five years providing management consultancy services to the sector while with Accenture in the UK, a role which saw her working with banks in markets across Europe and Asia.
Although her career has mainly been in finance, she has always had an interest in technology, starting with a software engineer job in the US in the late 90s.
“I was fascinated with technology from an early age,” she said.
“So, my first job was very close to what I studied in university, which was specialising in artificial intelligence and working with robotics and machine learning in their early days.”
