Simon
Bullers

I joined the Bank of England as its first Chief Technology Officer.

The Bank occupies a unique position at the centre of the UK financial system and presents a fascinating technology challenge: combining innovation and modern engineering with the resilience, security and responsibility required of a central bank.

My focus includes technology strategy, transformation, engineering capability, operational resilience and the responsible adoption of emerging technologies including AI and automation.

The opportunity is not simply to modernise technology.

It is to continue building the capability of the organisation to adapt as technology itself changes.

At Virgin Money I worked across technology and the wider organisation during an important period of transformation.

My work included artificial intelligence, automation, conversational banking, colleague technology and new ways of working, alongside strategic relationships with organisations including Microsoft and IBM.

One of the most interesting areas was conversational banking and Redi.

The experience reinforced something I strongly believe:

The most useful innovation happens when business and technology teams stop behaving like separate organisations.

At Hastings Direct we undertook a broad transformation of technology across cloud, infrastructure, workplace, core insurance systems, contact centre, data and engineering.

We deliberately avoided treating this as an infrastructure migration.

The objective was to improve how the organisation operated.

During the transformation:

• —Major incidents fell by approximately 90%, from 753 to 75.
• —Application performance improved by approximately 1.6×.
• —Some important customer processes became four to five times faster.

Core insurance workloads were migrated to Microsoft Azure and the organisation moved towards a modern cloud operating model.

But the most important transformation was cultural.

Technology improves quickly when people understand where they are going and have the authority and capability to get there.

Lloyds provided the opportunity to lead transformation at enormous scale.

The organisation had approximately 90,000 colleagues, a huge technology estate and the complexity that naturally develops inside a major financial institution over decades.

A significant focus was modernising colleague technology and moving away from traditional multi-year platform migrations towards an evergreen engineering model.

Our work with Microsoft ultimately became part of the development and early enterprise adoption of Microsoft Managed Desktop.

I subsequently presented the transformation with Microsoft at Ignite and discussed the programme on Microsoft’s The Shiproom.

It was during this period that one of my favourite transformation principles became particularly clear:

Work backwards from the destination, not forwards from the status quo.

If you begin with today’s constraints, you tend to build a slightly improved version of today.

Sometimes transformation requires starting somewhere else entirely.

RedPixie was one of the most important experiences of my career.

Building a technology company teaches you things large organisations sometimes allow you to forget.

• Customers matter.
• Cash matters.
• Talent matters.
• Culture matters.

And ultimately someone has to buy what you are building.

We grew RedPixie as a specialist technology business with a strong focus on financial services and developed a close strategic relationship with Microsoft.

The business later combined with Cloudamour, after which I moved from Chief Executive to President.

Building a company permanently influenced the way I approach executive technology leadership.

Technology decisions are business decisions.