Standard Chartered—Director, Global Markets Operations, India and South Asia Cluster Lead

Job description

Description: Job Summary The South Asia Cluster Lead, Global Markets Operations is a senior leadership role with full accountability for driving the end-to-end Markets Operations agenda across India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal. The role is critical to ensuring the cluster operates with strong control discipline, commercial alignment, operational resilience and consistent execution across multiple markets, products and stakeholder groups. The role provides strategic and day-to-day leadership across Middle Office, Client Support and Onboarding, while maintaining clear oversight and governance over all operational activities delivered through GBS, including confirmations, settlements, margining, reporting and related post-trade processes. It requires strong ownership of service quality, risk management, capacity, escalation discipline and delivery standards across both in-country and offshore-supported activities. The role holder will act as the primary senior Operations partner to Markets Heads, Trading, Sales and Country COOs in each market. They will be expected to provide trusted leadership, effective challenge and proactive business partnership, ensuring that operational priorities are aligned to business growth, regulatory expectations, client outcomes and the Bank’s control standards. This is a highly visible leadership role requiring strong execution, stakeholder influence and the ability to lead through complexity across a diverse South Asia franchise. Key Responsibilities Strategy • Define and execute the South Asia Global Markets Operations strategy across India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal, ensuring the operating model supports business growth, product complexity, regulatory expectations and operational resilience. • Build a scalable, well-governed and client-focused operations platform across in-country teams and GBS-supported processes, with clear ownership, consistent standards and disciplined execution. • Act as a trusted senior Operations advisor to Markets Heads, Trading, Sales and Country COOs, providing effective challenge on operational readiness, control standards, capacity, service performance and new business initiatives. • Drive alignment between country priorities, regional/global Operations strategy and transformation programmes, ensuring South Asia requirements are represented and delivered with pace and quality. Business • Lead the end-to-end Markets Operations agenda across South Asia, ensuring effective support for Trading, Sales, COO and client-facing business priorities across all relevant Global Markets products. • Provide leadership across Middle Office, Client Support and Onboarding, while maintaining robust oversight of GBS-supported confirmations, settlements, margining, reporting and related post-trade processes. • Enable business growth by ensuring strong operational readiness for new products, increased volumes, platform changes, regulatory developments and market structure changes. • Strengthen business partnership through proactive issue resolution, transparent service management, clear escalation and outcome-focused engagement with senior stakeholders. Processes • Own the South Asia Markets Operations process universe and service catalogue, covering trade support, lifecycle management, onboarding, client and sales support, exception management, investigations, reporting and post-trade controls. • Drive simplification, standardisation and automation of high-volume, high-risk and manually intensive processes to improve service quality, reduce operational risk and create sustainable capacity. • Ensure end-to-end process ownership across country and GBS teams, with clear hand-offs, documented procedures, measurable service standards and robust control points. • Use data, metrics and root-cause analysis to identify recurring process weaknesses, remove friction and improve execution quality across the operating model. People & Talent • Provide visible and accountable leadership across South Asia Markets Operations, building a high-performing, risk-aware and client-focused culture. • Develop leadership depth, succession strength and technical capability across Middle Office, Client Support, Onboarding and post-trade Operations teams. • Lead teams through change with clarity, transparency and discipline, ensuring colleagues understand priorities, ownership, expected standards and how their work contributes to business and client outcomes. • Foster collaboration across countries, functions and GBS locations, promoting a “one team” culture with strong conduct, inclusion and continuous improvement. Risk Management • Maintain a strong and preventative control environment across in-country and GBS-supported Markets Operations activities, with proactive identification, escalation and remediation of risks and control gaps. • Ensure operational risks from new products, volume growth, platform changes, regulatory requirements and business transformation are assessed, understood and appropriately mitigated. • Strengthen issue management, incident response, root-cause analysis and control remediation to prevent recurrence and improve resilience. • Provide effective challenge to business and functional stakeholders where operational risk, service quality, control standards or client outcomes may be compromised. Governance • Establish clear and effective governance across South Asia Markets Operations, including country teams and GBS-supported activities, with defined ownership, performance indicators, risk indicators and escalation pathways. • Represent Markets Operations in country, regional and business forums, ensuring decisions are informed by operational risk, regulatory commitments, client impact and control outcomes. • Maintain transparency over service performance, capacity, resilience, incidents, audit/regulatory matters and material operational issues across the cluster. • Provide strong oversight over outsourced, offshored and hubbed activities, ensuring service delivery, control accountability and governance remain clearly owned and actively managed. • Live and breathe the #NeverSettle value. Transformation • Lead South Asia Operations input into global and regional transformation programmes, ensuring country requirements, client impact, operational controls and implementation risks are fully understood and addressed. • Drive measurable improvements in productivity, control effectiveness, service quality and operational resilience through process simplification, digitisation and automation. • Partner with Technology, Product, COO, GBS, Risk and Change teams to deliver sustainable transformation outcomes that reduce manual dependency and improve scalability. • Champion continuous improvement by using data-led insights to prioritise opportunities, track benefits and embed lasting change across the cluster. Regulatory & Business Conduct • Take personal responsibility for embedding the highest standards of ethics, including regulatory and business conduct, across Standard Chartered Bank. This includes understanding and ensuring compliance with, in letter and spirit, all applicable laws, regulations, guidelines and the Group Code of Conduct. • Display exemplary conduct and live by the Group’s Values and Code of Conduct. • Effectively and collaboratively identify, escalate, mitigate, and resolve risk, conduct and compliance matters. • Provide leadership within the Middle Office organisation to comply with the highest standards of regulatory and business conduct and practices as defined by internal and external requirements. • Takes a proactive approach to implementing Just Culture and emphasising the importance of the groups’ valued behaviours regularly through retrospective sessions with the team and Channels townhall sessions. • Embed the Group’s Values and Group Code of Conduct to ensure adherence with the highest standards of ethics. Comply with relevant policies, processes, and regulations, as part of the culture. Key stakeholders • South Asia Markets Heads across India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal • Trading, Sales and Country COO teams in each market • Global Markets Operations leadership and product / process heads • Middle Office, Client Support and Onboarding teams • GBS Operations teams supporting confirmations, settlements, margining, reporting and related activities • Business Risk Management, Compliance, Operational Risk, Finance, Product Control, Technology and Change / Transformation teams • Regulators, auditors and external service providers, as applicable Trading, Sales, Middle Office and Product Operations Other Responsibilities • Leverage the opportunity provided by Corporate Social Responsibility to enhance the Group’s internal and external reputation and indirectly influence the bottom line. • Promote the Group’s brand and here for good with employees, clients and regulators. • Perform other responsibilities assigned under Group, Country, Business or Functional policies and procedures. • Maintain effective communication with key stakeholders, including regulators and staff. Skills and Experience • Markets Operations and Financial Markets product lifecycle • Middle Office, Client Support and Onboarding • Post-trade controls: confirmations, settlements, margining and reporting • Operational Risk, Controls and Governance • Stakeholder Management and Senior Business Partnership • Transformation, Process Simplification and Automation • Markets Operations and Financial Markets product lifecycle • Deep understanding of settlements across products, currencies, markets, legal entities and market infrastructures. • Strong ability to manage settlement risk, aged fails, claims, funding dependencies, deadlines and market penalties. • Proven ability to simplify settlement processes, reduce manual work and improve control outcomes. • Strong use of data to identify recurring issues, settlement risk themes and root causes. • Ability to lead large location-based teams with clear accountability and strong escalation discipline. Qualifications • University degree preferred, ideally in Finance, Economics, Business, Accounting, Operations, Technology, Data, Engineering or a related discipline. • Strong experience in Global Markets Operations, Post Trade Operations, Middle Office, Settlements, Confirmations, Reconciliations, Client Data, Fees, Controls, Risk Management, Change or Transformation. • Proven experience leading large teams across multiple locations, preferably including GBS, offshore or regional hub environments. • Strong understanding of Global Markets products, trade lifecycle, post-trade processes, legal entity requirements and operational risk. • Demonstrated track record in strengthening controls, improving service delivery, resolving complex issues and leading sustainable change. • Experience engaging senior stakeholders across Front Office, COO, Finance, Product Control, Technology, Risk, Compliance, Audit and country teams. • Ability to operate in a high-volume, time-sensitive and risk-sensitive environment with strong judgement and clear escalation discipline. • Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex issues clearly to senior stakeholders. • Proven senior leadership experience managing large or complex global functions with direct accountability for risk, people, performance and transformation. About Standard Chartered We're an international bank, nimble enough to act, big enough for impact. For more than 170 years, we've worked to make a positive difference for our clients, communities, and each other. We question the status quo, love a challenge and enjoy finding new opportunities to grow and do better than before. If you're looking for a career with purpose and you want to work for a bank making a difference, we want to hear from you. You can count on us to celebrate your unique talents and we can't wait to see the talents you can bring us. Our purpose, to drive commerce and prosperity through our unique diversity, together with our brand promise, to be here for good are achieved by how we each live our valued behaviours. When you work with us, you'll see how we value difference and advocate inclusion. Together we: - Do the right thing and are assertive, challenge one another, and live with integrity, while putting the client at the heart of what we do - Never settle, continuously striving to improve and innovate, keeping things simple and learning from doing well, and not so well - Are better together, we can be ourselves, be inclusive, see more good in others, and work collectively to build for the long term What we offer In line with our Fair Pay Charter, we offer a competitive salary and benefits to support your mental, physical, financial and social wellbeing. - Core bank funding for retirement savings, medical and life insurance, with flexible and voluntary benefits available in some locations. - Time-off including annual leave, parental/maternity (20 weeks), sabbatical (12 months maximum) and volunteering leave (3 days), along with minimum global standards for annual and public holiday, which is combined to 30 days minimum. - Flexible working options based around home and office locations, with flexible working patterns. - Proactive wellbeing support through Unmind, a market-leading digital wellbeing platform, development courses for resilience and other human skills, global Employee Assistance Programme, sick leave, mental health first-aiders and all sorts of self-help toolkits - A continuous learning culture to support your growth, with opportunities to reskill and upskill and access to physical, virtual and digital learning. - Being part of an inclusive and values driven organisation, one that embraces and celebrates our unique diversity, across our teams, business functions and geographies - everyone feels respected and can realise their full potential.