HSBC: Building Consensus in a Global Cloud Deployment
The Situation
At HSBC, I was leading the deployment strategy for a new suite of AWS-hosted digital platforms, designed to improve resilience and speed up product delivery across multiple global markets—Americas, Europe, Asia, and the UK.
It was a major shift from legacy infrastructure—technically and culturally. While group leadership was pushing for speed and innovation, regional CIOs and risk leads were deeply concerned about operational risk, regulatory exposure, and perceived loss of control. Several key markets, including India and China, strongly resisted the rollout.
The Task
My brief was to land a global deployment model that worked at scale—but I had to bridge wildly different risk appetites, cloud maturity levels, and governance expectations. My original approach—centralised rollout waves—was seen by several markets as too rigid, too fast, and too top-down.
The Action / Approach
I paused the push. Instead of broadcasting a strategy, I brought teams into the process.
We ran regional design sessions to surface constraints, co-develop deployment playbooks, and shift from ‘mandates’ to ‘guardrails’.
I partnered with Risk and Compliance to shape a shared resilience framework—so security wasn’t a blocker, but a shared anchor. I also reframed the narrative: from ‘cloud-first’ to ‘secure, adaptable digital foundation’. It sounds minor—but for some markets, it changed the tone from threat to opportunity.
The Result
We gained alignment without losing momentum. The revised model launched successfully in all priority markets, adapting to local needs while staying globally consistent.
Digital product deployment cycles sped up by 20%, and we reduced incident response time by over 30%. More importantly, trust improved. Regional tech leads—who once felt dictated to—became active champions of the new platform.
SO WHAT?
That experience reminded me: influence isn’t about pace or precision—it’s about co-ownership. Especially in high-stakes, multi-market environments, the way you shape the journey is just as critical as where you’re going.
It’s that balance of strategic clarity and cultural empathy that I bring to complex transformation.
