London · Director / Programme Manager, Financial Services

Ashutosh Pathak

Programme & Delivery Director

Twenty-five years delivering technology programmes inside regulated banks, at NatWest, Standard Chartered, DBS and Citi, across Asia, Europe and Africa. I have run a $60M+ transformation portfolio serving 20M+ clients, closed audit findings with MAS, RBI and the Big Four, and I currently own NatWest's Commercial & Institutional servicing platform: five Agile teams, 45 people, a phased AWS migration, and a live customer journey moving onto AI-enabled infrastructure.

LinkedIn Resume (PDF)
Selected work

Outcomes from $90M+ of delivered programmes

Regulated environments, five global banks, 26 countries. NatWest unless noted.
Shipped
Standard Chartered, 2015–22 · Regulatory

Audit findings closed across a $60M+ portfolio

Direct engagement with internal audit, EY, KPMG, Navigant, MAS and RBI: evidencing delivery readiness, agreeing remediation and driving it to closure.

Shipped
2024–25 · Governance

One release train across five concurrent teams

SDLC governance that holds Agile and Waterfall together, with named owners for RAID items and cross-team dependencies in a matrixed, regulated organisation.

Shipped
2024–25 · Engineering velocity

Fortnightly releases, from a 22-day cycle to under 12

Reusable, fully tested GitLab CI/CD pipeline templates in a PCF environment, with dedicated SIT, UAT regression and NFT environments. Cadence moved from quarterly and monthly to fortnightly.

Shipped
2024–25 · Quality

Every servicing journey now has automated regression

Selenium and Gherkin/BDD suite built from scratch, replacing manual regression. Defects surface days earlier and time to resolution dropped with them.

Shipped, a first for the bank
2025 · Deployment

Blue-green deployment replaced the weekend release window

On-demand, zero-downtime deploys in place of scheduled weekend outages. Teams release in working hours; no customer-facing downtime through the transition.

In flight
2025– · Platform

Phased AWS migration, one journey at a time

Moving the servicing platform off on-premises PaaS, cutting over a single journey per phase so there is no customer-facing downtime and no big-bang weekend.

In flight

Mandates: a live, high-volume journey moving onto a unified AI-enabled platform

Mandates is how customers add, remove or update signatories on business accounts. It runs today, largely by hand, split across two disconnected legacy platforms. I am leading its migration onto one unified AI-enabled platform on AWS, phase by phase: government-backed securities customers first (single-party, then multi-party), then Commercial Banking incorporated entities, then every Commercial Banking flow, then Business Banking. No data migrates between platforms; a case that opens on the old platform finishes there. On the new platform, a rules engine works alongside LLM agents for business-name matching and persona verification, plus agents that pull live data from the UK Charity Commission, Scottish Charity Register and FCA's Financial Services Register, with human review only where the rules require it.

  • Request received
  • Data extracted from request
  • Account & authoriser lookup
  • OCR & signature match
  • E-sign
  • Automated validation agents
  • External register checks
  • Human review
  • Fulfilment
730/day
Today, manual
Across Business and Commercial Banking, handled by a team of 70.
70,000+
Target, per month
Platform-wide automated volume once scaled across segments.
50%+
Target FTE reduction
Straight-through for incorporated companies; human-in-the-loop check retained for unincorporated.
Experience

25 years, three continents

Dec 2023 —
present
London
NatWest Group
Director / Programme Manager, Business & Technology Transformation
  • Programme manager for the full Commercial & Institutional servicing platform, Mandates, Cards onboarding, Payment Queries, Cheques, ePrivacy, Change of Business Details and others, across five Agile teams and 45 people.
  • Cut release cycle time from 22 days to under 12 and delivered the bank's first blue-green deployment.
  • Leading the Mandates migration, 730 requests a day handled manually today, onto a unified AI-enabled platform, phased by customer segment with no data migration between platforms.
  • Running the phased AWS migration, cutting over one servicing journey at a time.
  • Built the platform's test automation capability in Selenium and Gherkin/BDD.
Feb 2022 —
Dec 2023
London
Tata Consultancy Services
Project Manager / Release Train Manager, Customer Identification Management (client: NatWest)
Relocated from Singapore to the UK in 2022. Joined NatWest through this contract before moving into a permanent Director role.
  • Delivered the foundational Customer Identification Management capability: determining existing bank relationships and creating unique Party IDs for primary and related parties.
  • Linked Party IDs to Legal Entity IDs and source-system identifiers, feeding the strategic Party DB as the bank's single trusted source of customer identity.
May 2015 —
Feb 2022
Singapore
Standard Chartered Bank
Executive Director / Programme Manager, Technology & Innovation
  • Directed a global transformation portfolio above $60M serving 20M+ clients: Client Risk Assessment, Related Party Data Management, Banking Platform Services & Interfaces, and an ESG initiative.
  • Modernised the Client Risk Assessment engine for real-time financial crime risk across PEP, sanctions, AML and adverse media variables.
  • Closed audit and regulatory findings with internal audit, EY, KPMG, Navigant, MAS and RBI.
Feb 2012 —
May 2015
Singapore
DBS Bank
Senior Business Analyst / Transformation Lead, Institutional Banking
  • Specified OSCA, the credit rating platform for DBS's Bank Model, integrating the CSM rating engine, external financial-statement spreading, and Fitch, Moody's and S&P agency ratings.
  • Wrote the seven-tab rating workflow specification end to end, from pre-processing and initial CRR through Early Warning Signals to Adjusted CRR with RM override.
  • Rewrote the Facility Risk Rating specification to move from Foundation (FIRB) to Advanced (AIRB) IRB, recomputing LGD, PD, EAD and RWA.
  • Took it through build, SIT, UAT and go-live across a $7.5M MAS-aligned portfolio in six Asian markets.
Oct 2010 —
Feb 2012
Singapore
Citibank
Transformation Functional Lead, Global Customer Repository
  • Led functional transformation for a $30M Global Customer Repository programme across 26 countries.
  • Replaced fragmented records with a single trusted view of each customer, and set the identification and data-quality standards that KYC and regulatory reporting ran on.
May 2001 —
Aug 2010
Johannesburg, Stockholm, India
ABSA Bank, Citibank Nordics, earlier career
Business analyst roles
  • ABSA Bank (2009–10): Flexcube core-banking re-platforming across Tanzania and Mozambique.
  • Citibank Nordics (2008–09): digital and eCommerce banking, Cards and Loans across four Nordic markets.
  • Deutsche Bank, ICICI, Standard Chartered India, Ajuba (2001–08): banking operations, international payments, SWIFT processing.
Skills

Programme and delivery

  • Programme and portfolio governance
  • RAID and dependency management
  • Release train management
  • Agile and Waterfall SDLC
  • Budget forecasting

Technology and AI

  • LLMs in regulated journeys
  • BPMN workflow orchestration
  • AI governance
  • AWS migration
  • GitLab CI/CD

Governance

  • Executive and board reporting
  • Audit and regulatory engagement
  • Remediation management
  • Cross-functional leadership
Credentials

Education

Bachelor of EngineeringUniversity of Mumbai

Certifications

Certified ScrumMasterScrum Alliance, 2018
AWS Certified AI PractitionerSitting Q4 2026
AWS Certified Solutions Architect, AssociateSitting Q4 2026
Markets
UK, Singapore, India, South Africa

If you are hiring for a regulated delivery problem, I would like to hear about it.

LinkedIn Resume (PDF)