IN banking circles, Ashok Vaswani is a star and is currently head of consumer banking and payments at Barclays.
He has been at the bank for 10 years and took up his new role in April 2019.
Previously, he was CEO of Barclays UK and has had a distinguished role on the frontline of retail banking in this country.
One of his achievements was creating the new ring-fenced retail outfit ahead of the deadline– Vaswani had the new entity up and running on April 1 last year. It was the first of UK’s major retail banking outlets to do so (after the crash, the Government was told it was better for retail banks and their investing and trading arms to be separate businesses and introduced an act to make this so).
Responsible for some 30,000 colleagues as Barclays refers to them, and reporting directly only to Jes Staley, the bank’s ultimate head, Vaswani has been responsible for a number of high profile initiatives which have enhanced the bank’s reputation – or at least stopped it from going into freefall, as can happen very quickly in the financial sector.
He had a very firm digital agenda and shifted the focus from product innovation to improving the experience for customers - as a spokesperson told the GG2 Power List this year, “fundamentally transforming the way we do business – whilst delivering stable returns”.
The transformation was part digital – requisitioning the best technology and improving communication and digital support – another part was simply making the bank more user-friendly and not always directing customers to machines, but dealing with them face-to-face and knowing them and their needs better.
When he started on his digital revolution, he was acutely aware that not everyone has the same level of proficiency when it came to using the net. He also appreciated that safety was another concern. In May 2017 he helped to launch a UK-wide consumer engagement campaign to highlight the importance of digital safety and how Barclays would support that. Nearly five million people engaged in the campaign – and it was recognised widely in the media and even by Government ministers at the time.
Last year, the bank launched Thriving Local Economies and expanded its programme with Lifeskills.
This initiative is aimed at helping and supporting some 7.5 young million in the workplace. A Barclays spokesperson explained: “Through the Lifeschools programme more than 7.5 million young people in the UK have been helped to develop the core, transferrable skills they need for the world of work – and there is a commitment to upskill another 10 million by expanding support to all generations.”
The Thriving Local Economies initiatives is designed to retain and enhance the wealth of certain regions by encouraging Barclays customers to come together and exchange ideas and engage with the wider community to see if investment and planning can raise people’s and business’ income.
A slightly different take on this idea was launched in the Autumn in Bury, near Manchester.
In conjunction with think tank Demos, the two are looking to see how four different areas might benefit from a more joined up thinking in a particular area and how Barclays and other organisations may work together to provide solutions to common issues and problems and raise employment levels and lead to both businesses and individuals having money to spare. The bank’s branch in Bury had been there since 1798 and is currently housed in The Rock shopping centre, and Vaswani visited a school, talked to local traders and those that lived in Bury – asking what could be done to raise living standards, provide job security and set off a chain of reactions which would have beneficial impacts on communities beyond the locale – with some view to taking the best practices across the country.
Vaswani wrote about the move for the Manchester Evening News.
He noted that the town had an entrepreneurial spirit and had a culture of creating businesses.
He thought there was the potential to push Bury to the next level, but how could the bank and the area do it together and how could they harness these different skills and energies into some concrete and long-lasting and inspirational.
He told the newspaper he wanted Bury to thrive – and towns like Bury to recapture their former glories too and that this could be done ‘from the local up’ and not expect a leg-up from outside or the Government.
It’s a five-year plan and means Barclays will get people from local businesses, academics and schools to see how they might all work together and with one purpose – of improving the region’s incomes.
Vaswani has long been a champion of diversity and inclusion and often promoted and supported initiatives along these lines both from within the bank and outside - and quite a bit before it became fashionable to do so.
As well as being, on the powerful Barclays Group Executive Committee, he is also a member of the trustee board at Citizens Advice. He is also on a number of boards in an advisory capacity such as Rutberg & Company and is a founder director of Lend-A-Hand, a not-for-profit outfit that seeks to improve education in rural parts of India.
A former Barclays Africa CEO, Vaswani began his career as a management consultant and studied in India, first at Sydenham College of Commerce and Economics (part of Bombay University). Sydenham is among Asia’s most venerable and cited as the oldest college of its type on the continent. He then trained as a chartered accountant and was at Citi Group for eight years before returning to consultancy with Brysam Global Partners. He was brought up by a single mum and credits her with values that drove him to succeed and through that become someone who could inspire others. Vaswani travels a lot between London and New York, holds Singaporean citizenship, is married and has a grown-up daughter who works in San Francisco.
