Trailblazer-Manager Innovations-Out of the Blue at Standard Bank Group

Job Details

• The Standard Bank Group (SBG) is a firm believer in the customer being at the centre of everything we do and leveraging innovation as a key to help us guarantee exceptional service and leading-edge financial solutions. Our growing global success reflects our commitment to solving for what really matters to the customer, within their ecosystem, through the art of what is technologically possible, yet in deeply humanistic ways. Recognising that banking, as it is currently constituted, is insufficient to satisfy customer needs, SBG seeks to create the future for our customers by being more than a bank.
• To accelerate our transformational drive into this future, Digital Innovation has been established to develop new business models and platform businesses for identified ecosystems that both innovate and disrupt by always solving for the customer. By making lives easier, on a daily basis, through deep understanding of customer ‘pain points’ across the continent of Africa we contribute to building a commercially strong and sustainable group

Job Purpose

• The purpose of the individual Trailblazer within Digital Innovation is to defy convention by bringing a multifaceted and unique spectrum of capabilities to bear on the customer, their ecosytems and the platform businesses that resolve their daily challenges and ‘pain points’. By working with other, differently multifaceted yet equally capable Trailblazers, in small agile teams, innovate highly valuable solutions in identified customer ecosystems.
• The purpose of these Trailblazer teams is to provide a complete co-creation capability able to leverage partnerships and platforms to design, build, incubate, bring to scale and commercialise solutions for customer needs that may extend well beyond what is understood as the existing realm of banking. The realisation of the purpose of the individual Trailblazer cannot be separated from that of the team and hence the definition of a role as a spectrum, with each Trailblazer providing a unique subset of the total requirement.
• To manage execution of the Innovation function across Group and ensure an embedded innovation capability across the area. Encouraging creation of new ideas and solutions. Work with business to identify and frame hyper-specific business challenges. Lead the Innovation function across Group to encourage creation of new ideas and solutions.

Key Responsibilities/Accountabilities

License to operate:

• Key to understanding a Trailblazer role is the focus on the art of the possible and opportunity to define new boundaries, within the values of the organisation, the regulations governing the industry and the laws of the country, so that the common purpose is fulfilled and shared goals achieved.
• As a customer led disruptor with an open ended mandate, what is of paramount importance is a huge appetite to learn, to act and to learn again in an unrelenting focus on solving for what really matters to the customer, thereby setting new standards of service and engagement along the way.
• In particular, creative disruption cannot be constrained by legacy norms and practices in a world where the winner takes all.
• The role will be instrumental in transforming culture by acting as entrepreneurial ‘start-up’ while rapidly leveraging to scale as part of SBG.

Preferred Qualification and Experience

Qualifications:

• To the extent that tertiary education in a relevant field is often a precursor to further learning as well as an indicator of a level of cognitive ability, professional qualifications are an important, but not the only, underpinning of the minimum qualification required.
• To fulfil the role of Trailblazer a fully competent level of capability, that is recognised by the ‘profession’, in two or more fields of expertise is required. In a formal technical field this would be a professional certification but in emerging fields of expertise peer review would define the standard. The spectrum of appropriate technical capabilities required are listed below in the section titled Fields of Expertise.
• Diversity and breadth of skills are known characteristics of highly innovative individuals and hence the preferred qualifications for the role are as above but in widely disparate fields. For example, an engineer with a post graduate degree in liberal arts could well be an ideal qualification set.

Experience:

• Malcolm Gladwell’s analysis in his book “Outliers’ of the need for 10 000 hours of focussed study and experience in order to truly master a field of expertise captures the sense of what is required in this role. The required level of experience should prepare an individual to be in a position to provide a profound input, with appropriate cognisance of the associated fields, in order to deliver both the depth as well as the breadth of contribution essential to the team.

Knowledge/Technical Skills/Expertise

Knowledge :

Digital technologies:

• Digital platforms (data, content, technology and tools) functionality, technical and information architecture.

4th IR technologies:

• Artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, blockchains, API & Open Banking.