Amy Williams, Business Banking Chief Information Officer, Barclays
Driving the technology that enables real change
Amy has built an extremely successful career in technology in the Financial Services industry, and joined Barclays in 2017 as the Open Banking Programme Director. Since December 2019, she has lead our Business Technology teams, delivering end-to-end systems integration and supporting the business change that leads to better, more innovative solutions for our customers.
Providing critical support
“In business banking, we provide critical support to around 1.2m customers across the UK, and technology has a massive impact on the way we serve them. Barclays Technology has a crucial role to play, and I have relished the opportunity to be involved in genuinely game-changing tech programmes.
“Since joining Barclays, I’ve led significant projects that have made a huge difference to our quality of service, such as our Open Banking Technology Programme. This enables fast, secure transfer of customer banking data between the bank and third-party applications, such as payment apps. Our release of Open Banking in 2018 was our first large-scale deployment of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and involved the co-ordination of changes across many channels and platforms.
I have relished the opportunity to be involved in genuinely game-changing tech programmes.
Opening new channels
“We also worked with the Barclays Developer Network team to prepare our new developer channel, Barclays API Exchange. This has improved the experience for application Developers, key to the success of Open Banking and the way we manage APIs – both now vital to our business and the wider industry. Open Banking now services over 2 million transactions a week across over 100 third party providers: this is the future, and we are at the forefront of this banking revolution.
“Since the first release, we’ve completed several important projects to add depth, functionality and richness to our products and services. This has been an immense undertaking, especially considering the newness of this technology, and I’m proud of the way everyone in the team went above and beyond to deliver. Every aspect of every programme of work we do is critical.
Putting talent to work
“I find my role here to be challenging, exciting and rewarding in equal measure. I like to think that some of my personal skills are a great fit with Barclays’ culture: I’m tenacious, detail-focused, and able to build excellent relationships with colleagues. All of which fit perfectly with Barclays’ strong values of respect, service excellence and integrity.
“I’m very much looking forward to embracing a new challenge as part of my new CIO role. Barclays is a place where I can use my talents to have a real effect – not only on the bank and the people around me, but on the whole industry and the people whose lives and businesses we support.”