Bank of America just lost a key tech executive who oversaw the bank's vendors and tech operations ac
- Sumeet Chabria, the bank's head of global business services, has left the bank.
- He oversaw all business lines as the COO of the bank's executive tech and ops division.
- These are the top execs now running BofA's reorganized tech and ops divisions after a shakeup last fall.
Bank of America's senior technology leadership is changing once again.
This May, Sumeet Chabria, one of Bank of America's top eight tech executives, announced his departure from the bank, Insider has learned.
Chabria played two key roles for Bank of America. He was the global chief operating officer of the tech and operations team, which oversaw technical operations across all eight business lines, data governance, information security, and infrastructure services. He was also the head of global business services, responsible for several thousand vendors that provide the bank with tech, operations, and business services.
A spokesperson for Bank of America confirmed Chabria's departure. In a LinkedIn post announcing his exit, Chabria did not say what he is planning next.
Chabria will be replaced by Madhuri Deshpande, previously the bank's head of global delivery for consumer, small business, and wealth management technology.
Desphande has been with the bank for 16 years, according to her LinkedIn. Prior to her promotion, she was a senior vice president at BA Continuum, a Bank of America subsidiary based in India that provides IT services to the bank.
Chabria's departure comes after leadership changes in 2021
Last September, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan announced a sweeping set of executive changes that elevated new faces to some of the most senior roles in the company and saw new leadership in charge of the bank's tech, operations, finance, legal, and administration divisions.
Cathy Bessant, the bank's chief technology and operations officer, headed to Paris as she took on a vice-chair role overseeing Bank of America's global strategy alongside the bank's European boards.
In August 2021, Insider profiled Bessant and her team of eight direct reports who oversee the bank's vast network of technology work and operations.
"One of the key ingredients to making it work is that they are integrated with each other," Bessant told Insider in August of her leadership team of eight. "A technology and operations organization doesn't have the luxury of being able to be an island."
Bank of America had previously consolidated its tech and ops businesses under Bessant, creating a unified structure that flowed through to her and provided a universal view of some $14 billion in annual spending and 95,000 global employees.
But with Bessant's move, the tech and ops organization split into two separate entities under the oversight of Aditya Bhasin, who is now chief technology and information officer, and Tom Scrivener, who serves as chief operations executive. Both sat on Bessant's team of senior leaders.
"With Cathy's move to Europe, we are creating two distinct, dedicated organizations with deeply experienced leaders covering the former technology and operations organization," Moynihan said in a company-wide memo last fall.
Bhasin previously headed tech for Bank of America's consumer and wealth management businesses, while Scrivener was head of consumer, small-business, and wealth operations.
Before the divisions were unified under Bessant, she said the bank used 64 customer-relationship-management platforms. She and her team brought that number down to two, she told Insider in August. And what used to be a footprint of more than 60 data centers now numbers 20, with the goal of sunsetting four more centers.
The decision to unify the tech and ops groups at Bank of America was driven by four goals — enabling businesses, simplification and modernization, cost management, and risk management — all within the constraints of a highly regulated, if well-capitalized, bank.
"There are some natural tensions in any organization. People always want more tech resources. An important part of the discipline is to have that investment looked at on a central basis and managed on a central basis," Bessant said in August.
The tech and ops organizations' combined budgets total $14 billion a year. Roughly $10 billion of that is devoted to Bank of America's tech budget, while about $4 billion goes to operations.
Moynihan and the bank's executives increased the bank's spending on new initiatives, much of which centers on tech innovation, by $500 million, to $3.4 billion annually, in 2021. For about the past decade, Bank of America had spent roughly $3 billion a year on new initiatives.
"If you look at the revenues, some of the technical teams — and realize that I manage a budget of $14 billion — you can surmise how much each of them manage. They are running large organizations that would be on the Fortune 500 list," Bessant said in August.
Here are the 8 key execs overseeing Bank of America's tech and ops divisions
Aditya Bhasin
Chief technology and information officer
Aditya Bhasin was named chief technology and information officer as part of the leadership shakeup announced on Friday.
Bhasin, who previously oversaw Bank of America's consumer-banking and wealth-management businesses, will now lead one half of the newly-split tech and ops division.
His remit will include tech for all lines of business and staff support areas, in addition to global information security, technology infrastructure, independent technical assessment, and global business services.
In his prior role, he oversaw the technology running the bank's consumer and wealth apps and in-person financial centers. His team also had coverage of Bank of America's payments and commerce tech used by individual and small-business customers.
Tom Scrivener
Chief operations executive
Tom Shrivener heads up Bank of America's operations division for all business lines, taking over the other half of the now-split tech and ops division.
Scrivener previously managed operations across consumer, small-business, wealth-management, and private-banking lines of business at Bank of America. He also worked closely with Aditya Bhasin, who was tapped to lead the bank's tech division, directing a team of more than 15,000 employees.
Scrivener will continue to lead Bank of America's Paycheck Protection Program forgiveness, an organization made up of 2,000 employees who facilitate the loan-forgiveness process of the government aid program for small businesses.
Madhuri Deshpande
Head of global business services
A 16-year veteran of Bank of America, Deshpande was promoted in May to succeed Sumeet Chabria.
As head of global business services, Deshpande runs the bank's international tech operations and is responsible for the several thousand vendors that provide the bank with technology, operations, and business services. Deshpande also sits on the global business services leadership team.
Previously, Deshpande was Bank of America's head of global delivery for consumer, small business, and wealth management technology.
Tony Kerrison
Chief technology officer, head of core technology and infrastructure services
Tony Kerrison oversees how the bank's internal technology — the cloud, internal servers, data centers, networks, engineering, application services, and automation — is architected across the firm.
Kerrison's organization, called technology and infrastructure services, crosses all eight business lines and regions, and it handles incident management.
He joined the leadership team in May, a nod to the bank's increased focus on infrastructure and cloud initiatives. Along with the promotion came a bigger remit, which includes application-production support for global banking and markets, and consumer, small-business, and wealth management.
David Reilly
Head of global banking and markets technology, enterprise risk and finance technology
David Reilly heads up two teams at Bank of America: one supporting the technology underpinning the bank's global banking and markets business, and another serving Bank of America's enterprise risk and finance division. He also headed up the bank's migration to the private cloud — a seven-year initiative, completed in 2019, that the bank said saved roughly $2 billion in infrastructure costs.
Reilly joined Bank of America in 2011 from Morgan Stanley, where he was the chief information officer of enterprise infrastructure. At Bank of America, Reilly served first as chief technology officer for global wealth and investment management and then as the bank's chief technology officer before taking on his current role in 2017.
Paul Simpson
Head of global banking and markets operations
Paul Simpson heads up the operations underpinning Bank of America's services for commercial, corporate, investment-banking, and government clients, as well as its small-business and business-banking customers. The role includes coverage across the bank's sales and trading, underwriting, and treasury and trade businesses.
Simpson works with David Reilly and leads technology and operations teams in the Asia-Pacific region, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin American regions.
Craig Froelich
Chief information security officer
Craig Froelich heads up global information security at Bank of America and is responsible for protecting the money and information of the bank and its customers. His team of experts spans 13 countries and works closely with industry and government groups to strengthen defenses against current and future threats. As part of doing so, Froelich's organization has filed or been granted more than 650 cybersecurity patents.
Froelich has also spearheaded recruitment initiatives geared toward neurodivergent people, something he said had strengthened the bank's cyber ranks while creating a more collaborative workplace culture.
Susan Yung
Head of horizontal tech initiatives and independent technical and operations assessments
Susan Yung was the most recent addition to the leadership group, joining the team following Laurie Readhead's departure. Readhead, Bank of America's enterprise chief information and data officer and one of Bessant's direct reports, is retiring at the end of September, Insider previously reported.
Yung now leads horizontal tech initiatives and also independent reviews of Bank of America's tech projects. She also heads up global technology and operations capacity and monitoring as well as asset governance.
Yung previously led securities core trading operations at Bank of America and reported to Paul Simpson. Her team handled post-trade operations and served as a linkage to Bank of America's global equities trading partners. Yung also led technology and operations for Latin America and Canada across business lines.
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