FEATURE : STATE OF THE CIO
THE NEWEST ‘ NEW NORMAL ’ IS JUST AROUND THE CORNER ; YOU HAVE TO BE OPEN TO LEARNING ABOUT IT SO YOU CAN ADOPT THE LATEST TECHNOLOGY AND USE IT TO EMPOWER YOUR BUSINESS . anything from two to five days . Cross-border payments are core to Banking Circle ’ s offering and we are always working towards making payments as fast and costeffective as possible for our clients .
As part of this , we recently shifted our entire infrastructure to Microsoft Azure . Although our technology has always provided compliance and cut down the manual handling of transactions , our core banking systems were previously supported by a managed service that was a bottleneck for development . Shifting to the cloud was the answer ; with our entire infrastructure cloud-based , we can evolve architecture rapidly to respond to the everchanging demands of the industry .
During this project , one of the biggest challenges my team faced was learning to operate with a cloud mindset and figuring out the way it allows you to scale up and down . They say knowledge is power and the project required significant upskilling . We worked through this by making sure internal communication was prioritised as well as working closely with the provider .
What management qualities do you believe are essential for leading a successful team and how do you instil these into the workplace ?
There is a broad palette of skills needed to be a CIO . Primarily , you need technical competency and an understanding of the technology landscape . The next step is applying technology to business challenges . This combination of business sense and tech skills is crucial to success .
You also need to be a strong leader . Your team will look to you for answers , so being equipped with sound managerial skills and the ability to work strategically and tactically means being an effective mentor . To achieve this , good communication skills coupled with integrity and independence are a must .
You can inspire these traits in the workforce through leading by example . For instance , encourage entrylevel employees to ask questions and encourage mid-level managers to lead the way .
How do you ensure you deliver outcomes that support Banking Circle ’ s business goals ?
We put clients at the heart of what we do . In turn , clients are loyal which helps us grow and allows us to invest time and money right back into innovating for them . That ’ s the reason we migrated to the cloud – it offers so much flexibility and scalability , enabling our clients to be agile in the face of ever-evolving requirements .
We also offer open APIs which enable easy integration between the platform ’ s functions and clients ’ workflows so they can easily integrate payment services into their own infrastructure .
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