Richard Howell Email & Phone Number

95877 Bezons, Fr

Northern Europe & APAC CTO - CEO Office

London, Gb

Head of Infrastructure Management responsible for ensuring Royal Mail leverages its investment in technology and manages its outsource providers in a professional and consistent manner.

As Technical Director one of my key responsibilities was to help drive the group’s growth and expansion plans making sure the technology the company used was cost effective, robust and met the business and regulatory demands.I was also responsible for pulling together all the group’s marketing activities as we looked to push out into new territories and develop the company's online presence. Part of my role was to develop the technology and IT infrastructure within the Group and to ensure the cloud based and internal solutions we built and managed were fully integrated and highly available at all times.

London, Gb

In this role I was responsible for the architectural design, infrastructure build, the automation processing, the technical support through to the delivery of the technology and services into the four strategic Computer Datacentres across the world; these being in Mexico, North America, Europe and HK.This global team were at the forefront of the HSBC's Group strategy of joining up the organisation, being responsible for building and integrating the core infrastructure components across the Group which ultimately is what the world saw of HSBC.The team supporting this initiative was geographically dispersed within the Group and the role included both direct line management of (circa 480 staff) and the functional management of a further (circa 580) infrastructure engineers spread across the Group. The strategic aspect of this role also involved the management and setting the technical direction of the Middleware technologies to ensure HSBC as an organisation made the most of the technology. The role included the functional management of the Regional Heads of Enterprise Technology ensuring the Group collaborate, share best practice, operate as one and adhere to the strategic direction set by the Group Head of Enterprise Technologies Engineering.

London, Gb

Head of eBusiness Infrastructure - Technical Support Services EuropeAs Head of eBusiness Infrastructure I was responsible for managing several teams of Regional Project Managers, Technical Services Managers and Systems Specialists across the Group in the build and support of the strategic One HSBC customer facing Group front-end internet infrastructure which included the end to end design, architecture and engineering of infrastructure components (e.g. web servers, application servers, database and code and content management systems).In addition to managing the engineering and project management teams (circa 180 employees) I was responsible for establishing the Group Performance CoE. This team gained Group recognition as the go-to team for all high-profile system and/or application performance related issues. In the short-time I managed this small dedicated team of 35 Performance experts we saved the Group in excess of $128 million recurring costs within the Group in the first year and made a number of services more resilient in the process.

London, Gb

TSS Middleware management department were responsible for the delivery of messaging, database administration and Web technologies across all processing infrastructure in use within the European division of the Bank.In this role I managed the messaging infrastructure teams, covering CICS, MQ Series, Websphere, DB2, Oracle, Application Server technology and EAI.I had line management responsibility for several teams and the people management of 72 FTE onshore resources plus 36 FTE based in group technology centres overseas.This team consisted of highly motivated 'world class engineers' and a number of graduates who required development and basic skills IT training. This was an expanding team and an area the Bank was looking to establish and develop as a longer term investment.There were many learning points in this role as we grew and expanded the team to meet the ever increasing business demands and need to implement critical projects to very aggressive timelines as the Group embraced thin-client browser based architecture.We built and developed strong relationships with the business and development community, the messaging engineering teams across the group and offered strong leadership and direction within the Group in a number of technologies in this space.

Executive Leadership Programme, Executive Leadership

Leading In A Performance Driven Culture, Executive Leadership

Accelerated Development Programme, Executive Leadership

Post-Graduate Diploma In Management Studies, Management Studies

Ba, Business & Finance