Leigh-Ann Russell

"I had to stamp cheques every day; thousands of them. I’d get to 1,500 stamps, and then I'd forget the number, and I have to start it all again. It just wasn't my dream of how I would spend my life"

"Legacy”? Just a bit, then! Whilst much of it is proud “legacy”, the bank, like every well-established financial services firm, had no shortage of ageing infrastructure and applications to clean up. Mercifully, a major overhaul had already born fruit when Russell joined in 2024, she cheerfully admits."

"I think the partnership bonus was the most critical [lesson]. [I learned early on that] you work better in a partnership than you do in a traditional supplier relationship, because you understand what your client is trying to do better, and you'll go the extra mile to help them do that."

"They touch almost everything at the bank” she says on production deployments, citing “anomaly detection on our asset servicing platforms, trade settlements; on our Client Services team, we have a multi-agentic solution; these are delivering real value in dollar terms and productivity terms. I would say that scale [of deployment] is pretty unique…”"

"environment you're trying to play into, you can standardize your own products, make your own business better… get into that real win-win for both organizations” she adds. “Nobody's successful without great partnerships. That is a real focus for me in engineering.”"