Kiwibank hires Hamish Rumbold as chief technology officer

Kiwibank hires Hamish Rumbold as its chief technology officer

By Jenny Ruth

May 27 (BusinessDesk) - Kiwibank has appointed Hamish Rumbold as its new chief digital and technology officer who will join the bank in August.

Rumbold currently works for ClearPoint, which Kiwibank says is one of New Zealand’s leading digital experience and engineering firms, and had previously led Air New Zealand’s global digital distribution channels, digital marketing capability and customer-facing technology.

“This included leading the platform and product development of customer-facing technologies including www.airnz, the Air NZ app, artificial intelligence – Oscar, in-flight wifi connectivity, the Airband and disrupt management,” Kiwibank says.

Kiwibank is in sore need of technology know how. In the year ended June, 2017, the bank scrapped its project to install a new banking system and wrote off $90 million from the then four-year old project. It wrote off a further $7 million relating to the costs of winding down that project in the six months ended December 2017.

That project cost former chief executive Paul Brock his job.

Rumbold is currently a Fidelity Life director and a director of tech start-up Fresho.

“Hamish’s career shows a great understanding of how technology can transform the experience for our customers and team,” says Kiwibank’s replacement chief executive Steve Jurkovich, who joined the bank at the end of July 2018.

“He has a proven track history of bringing the best combination of people, process and technology together,” Jurkovich says.

“Technology will play a key part in Kiwibank’s success. We searched both locally and overseas and considered a fantastic range of candidates. Hamish has lived and worked in New Zealand, the UK, India and South America,” he says.

“He has experience across the aviation, retail banking retail, retail, FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods), automotive and telecommunications industries. His experience and passion for Kiwis and the businesses they own makes him the perfect leader for Kiwibank’s technology and digital capabilities.”

When Jurkovich was in his second week on the job last year, he said Kiwibank was doing a lot of thinking about how it would tackle technology.

The bank would focus on what customers it wants, what services it wants to provide them and how it will go about delivering and then make technology decisions based on that, he said then.

No decision had been made as to whether to repeat the exercise of trying to build a new system in house or to look for off-the-shelf solutions.

“I’m not biased towards build it or rent it, but we live in a world that’s pretty open and there’s a whole lot of capabilities that we can utilise. I want to keep everything on the table for now,” Jurkovich said then.

(BusinessDesk)

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