Join us as a Simplification Programme Director
- You’ll be fully accountable for the end to end leadership and delivery of Retail’s multi-year simplification agenda, driving structural cost reduction, operational resilience, and improved customer and colleague outcomes
- The role operates at enterprise scale, shaping strategy, mobilising delivery, and ensuring clear financial ownership, disciplined investment management, and sustained benefits realisation
- This is your opportunity to build and lead a high‑performing programme leadership team, setting clear direction, pace, and accountability
- You'll be required to work in our London office, 250 Bishopsgate a minimum of four days per week
As a Simplification Programme Director, you’ll drive and lead the Retail simplification strategy, aligned to Group priorities, financial plans, and regulatory expectations. You’ll own the investment envelope for the simplification portfolio, ensuring disciplined prioritisation, phasing, and reallocation of funding to maximise return on investment. You’ll also actively lead senior stakeholder engagement across COO, Technology, Data & AI, Finance, Risk, and business leadership to resolve trade‑offs and unblock delivery.
You’ll also be:
- Driving measurable benefits realisation, e.g. cost saves, process reduction, technology decommissioning and automation uplift, with transparent tracking and financial assurance
- Providing single‑point accountability for a portfolio of complex, interdependent programmes delivering cost, complexity, and risk reduction
- Sponsoring and governing the responsible deployment of advanced automation and Agentic AI solutions as part of the simplification agenda, in line with risk, control, and regulatory standards
- Ensuring robust programme governance, financial control, and dependency management, operating within Group delivery, finance, technology, and risk frameworks
You’ll need strong commercial and financial acumen, with confidence in cost‑base discussions, investment trade‑offs, and return‑on‑investment optimisation. You’ll also need strong stakeholder management and influencing skills, including constructive challenge at senior levels.
We’ll also expect you to have:
- Experience operating with clear cost and benefit ownership, working closely with Finance to ensure savings are credible, signed off, and embedded into the run‑rate
- Proven track record of delivering material, quantifiable financial outcomes at scale
- Extensive experience delivering enterprise‑wide simplification or transformation programmes within a complex, regulated banking environment
- Strong understanding of bank financials, including cost‑base management, investment planning, capital considerations, and benefits realisation
- A background in leading large‑scale transformation, simplification, or change portfolios
- Strong understanding of operating models, technology landscapes, and end‑to‑end process design, including legacy complexity reduction
Hours
35Job Posting Closing Date:
02/04/2026Ways of Working:Office FirstTop Skills
What We Do
We’re a business that understands when our customers and people succeed, our communities succeed, and our economy thrives. As part of our purpose, we’re looking at how we can drive change for our communities in enterprise, learning and climate. As one of the leading supporters of UK business, we’re prioritising enterprise as a force of change. We’re focusing on the people and communities who have traditionally faced the highest barriers to entry and figuring out ways to remove these. Learning is also key to our continued growth as a company in an ever changing and increasingly digital world. By setting a dynamic and leading learning culture, our people prosper, and our customers are given the tools to continue to improve their financial capability and confidence. One of the biggest challenges we all face in our future is climate change. That’s why we’ve put it right at the core of our purpose. We want to champion climate solutions with financing and entrepreneurial support, fully embed climate into our culture and decision making, and be climate positive by 2025. We’re committed to using our purpose to break down barriers, drive change and ultimately create a great place to work.
