Steve Watson Email & Phone Number

Aliso Viejo, Ca, Us

Leading the existing client relationships for the UK Banking segment. Formulating and driving the strategy for growth in this domain. Identifying the industry trends and client needs to innovate and create the capabilities, solutions and partnerships to transform banking organisations.

Aliso Viejo, Ca, Us

Mclean, Va, Us

Providing strategic direction and leadership to agile technology teams consisting of 100+ people and £12M-15M investment to execute technology transformation across our customer servicing platforms and deliver digital exeriences which delight our 3 million+ customers and help them succeed with credit. Building high performing, multi-discipline, cross functional teams across multiple geographies, covering architecture, design, software engineering and agile delivery and change leadership to create great technology solutions across multiple agile value streams for Capital One. Responsible for hiring, development and organisational design for the teams, including establishing effective partnerships with key third party suppliers of engineering personnel and services to increase pace and reduce costs.Direct people leadership of 6 to 8 senior managers across software engineering, architecture and agile delivery.Key Achievements:Designed and implemented agile practices, ways of working and culture of continuous improvement to increase pace of release of value and improve engagement, enablement and inclusion across teams in a hybrid environment. Established cross-functioal comunity to support, educate and tackle systemic delivery challenges across the organisation.Modernised and simplified around 30 applications and platforms through a targeted Cloud migration strategy to AWS and managed devops pipeline, resulting in increased resilience and security, lower support and maintenance costs and faster and safer delivery of changes.Fostered a highly effective parttnership with Product and Design Strategy leaders to establish OKRs aligned to organisational goals and provide focus to teams and leaders. Established capability targets for web and mobile app digital servicing channels, customer comms, credit line management and payments, aligned to target architecture and enterprise standards. Aligned investments in new capabilities with wider cloud migration work.

Mclean, Va, Us

Senior agile delivery leader with accountability for delivering value through technology across value streams associated with customer servicing and customer resiliency with annual investment budgets of £8M to £12M. Partnering with product managers and business sponsors to provide insight and navigate evolving strategic priorities to develop vision, OKRs and roadmaps for the teams.People leadership responsibility for a team of 10-12 agile delivery leaders across multiple teams and locations. Coached and mentored delivery and engineering managers to embed lean / agile practices and ways of working and empower teams to achieve business outcomes and personal development goals. Mentored and managed 3rd party engieering and delivery leads to align culture and practices with partner teams on and offsite.Accountable for overall delivery efficiency and effectiveness, creating a culture of continuous improvement through use of data-driven insights to increase sustainable pace, whilst maintaining quality and delivery compliance. Responsible for capacity and pipeline planning, collaborating across the business with product managers, designers and engineers to optimise end to end value delivery.Key Achievements:Developed and owned scaled agile delivery process and risk controls for the organisation ensuring appropriate metrics and governance was in place to ensure teams stayed well managed and aligned on practice where it mattered.Delivered AWS cloud-hosted Web Servicing platform to enable over 2.5M customers to service their credit card accounts and move away from a more costly, inflexible 3rd party solution, unlocking ability to innovate with new features and deliver more quickly to customers.

Mclean, Va, Us

Responsible for the end to end delivery of various cross-functional projects and programmes across Brand Marketing, Operations and IT in line with corporate strategic roadmap and portfolio investment plans.Accountable for the planning, resourcing and execution of end to end delivery across the business functions, through multiple teams, leveraging a mix of traditional programme delivery methodologies as well as lean / agile practices.Providing people leadership of 4 to 6 project managers / scrum masters, managing their performance and development and supporting their career aspirations through structured objective setting, coaching and mentoring.Key Achievements:Shaped and led a multi-year programme of work to transform key customer acquisition platforms to modern SOA-based architecture, including credit bureau integration, credit decision engine and data ecosystem and workflow management. These changes unlocked significant competitive advantages key to the success of the business strategy. These included:- ability to implement more powerful credit risk models more quickly, enabling the business to offer credit to more customer and respond rapidly to changes in credit risk, market conditions, etc, resulting in huge increases in account bookings and reductions in credit losses- ability to quickly move between credit bureaus to take advantage of more extensive data sets and reduce credit search and data costs- reduce friction in the customer joining journey, reducing dropout ratesLed delivery for initial pilot for adoption of Agile delivery across the organisation, standing up 5 scrum teams and engaging several agile coaches to train teams and leaders and support the transition. Passed the 'show me' test with leadership team and get agreement to scale up by delivering groundbreaking customer acquisition feature, QuickCheck, in 14 weeks end to end, providing the ability to ramp up new account originations to 1M per year.

Mclean, Va, Us

Responsible for planning, resourcing and leading the delivery of various IT projects across IT, Operations and Marketing associated with new card / lending product testing and rollout, regulatory compliance mandates and data and technology infrastructure. Implementing sound project management practices to control scope, cost and quality and ensure overall governance of the work and management of risks.Key Achievements:Business tranformation programme to migrate consumer card portfolio to a shared industry standard third-party hosted account processing platform and integrate into the legacy technology estate. Responsible for shaping and leading the work to migrate all batch data movement, tranfomration and storage in partnership with 3rd party engineering respurcing partner.Delivery of technology change to enable the launch of key card and lending projects, such as secured card, Amex partnership and homeowner loans.

London, Gb

One of the UK's leading energy suppliers and the second largest electricity generator in the UK. Managed the design, development, implementation, ongoing maintenance and support of the East Midlands regional electricity distribution network control and safety management systems, including all telecontrol systems, and led a team of 4 to 6 engineers.Set up and managed project delivery teams and ongoing cross-functional support and development teams (internal and 3rd party) to ensure real-time service delivery.Analyzed current/future needs, working closely with control centre management leaders.Led the strategic replacement of the existing legacy technology with a modern and cost-effective solution.

Uk , Gb

3 year apprenticeship in electronics engineering and telecoms consisting of practical experience as a technician in design, manufacturing and testing and development of telecommunication systems, with part time study for qualifications in telecoms and electronics. Transitioned to technician developing simulators and test harnesses for testing and development of System X digital telephony system in partnership with British Telecom.