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Bank of England CIO John Finch leaves for new role at Thomson Reuters

The Bank of England is dividing its technology team in two to replace departing CIO John Finch

Bank of England CIO John Finch is leaving the organisation, with his former responsibilities being divided in two.

Finch joined the Bank in November 2013 from Experian where he was global CIO. He was responsible for all aspects of technology delivery and cyber security across the Bank, but is now moving to a new role as chief technology officer for Thomson Reuters' financial and risk business, Computer Weekly has learned.

With Finch’s departure, as of 25 January 2016 his former Projects, Data and Technology group will become two divisions at the Bank. Jonathan Curtiss - currently head of programmes and transformational change – will become chief programme officer, responsible for programmes and data. In the other division, Rob Elsey, who joined in October 2015 as chief technology officer, will become CIO, responsible for technology. Elsey was previously head of IT at Vodafone.

“It has been a huge opportunity coming to the Bank of England to gain a different set of experiences and meet a different group of people,” Finch told Computer Weekly in an interview in soon after joining in 2013.

As CIO, Finch looked after the Bank’s real time payments infrastructure for the UK, big data analytics and regulatory and compliance projects. He was voted as the 17th most influential person on UK IT in Computer Weekly’s 2015 UKtech50 list.

"Analytics is a major part of what we do. In some cases we capture data that is fed into clever econometric models run by economists. But there are also standard off-the-shelf analytics tools to provide time-series data and trend analysis,” Finch said in his 2013 interview.

"We have some deeply analytical systems that capture data to provide intelligence to the people who look at the bank, the economy, and to make interest rates decisions."

John Finch

"It has been a huge opportunity coming to the Bank of England"

John Finch

Finch succeeded Simon Moorhead as Bank of England CIO, who is now global CIO at International Financial Data Service (IFDS).

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