Standard Chartered’s head of ‘workspace transformation’ has just re-joined Goldman Sachs’ technology team after a seven-year break from the US bank.
David Beatty has moved to Goldman as an executive director, based in Singapore. This is his second tech stint at Goldman, having started out in London back in 1999. He rose to ED level there and then transferred to Hong Kong in 2007, staying until 2011 as an ED, according to his online profile.
While Beatty is still an ED in 2018, this is not unusual in a Goldman context. The bank only makes promotions to MD every two years and many senior staff remain EDs for their entire careers at the firm.
Beatty left Goldman to establish Hong Kong-based internet start-up Refer.me, which closed down in 2013. He also co-founded luxury property platform Spacious in 2012, alongside former Goldmanite Asif Ghafoor, who we interviewed two years ago.
By 2013, however, Beatty was back in banking at Standard Chartered – a relatively early example of banks’ willingness to hire senior technologists with start-up experience. As head of workspace engineering, he had global responsibility for end-user-computing productivity. Beatty was promoted into his latest Stan Chart job in January 2016 and led engineering for “user-centric workspace transformation”.
His return to Goldman comes as the bank continues to build its Singapore technology centre. Singapore is one of Goldman’s main hubs in Asia, although its tech headcount there is dwarfed by its IT workforce in Bengaluru, India. Technologists already account for about 25% of Goldman’s staff globally and CEO Lloyd Blankfein has called his firm a “technology company”.
Beatty leaves Stan Chart in the midst of its own hiring drive in Singapore. It has been investing heavily in digital banking and technology in Singapore over the past two years, including hiring about 300 technologists in 2016 alone as part of a $300m global platform upgrade.
Stan Chart has made a spate of senior tech hires in Singapore over the past six months. Most recently, Bob Fabrizi joined from DBS as head of production support services for private banking, wealth management and retail.
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