RBS Account Newsletter
April 2015
Hello RBS Team,
Hope you had a great weekend.
As we have witnessed an incredible growth of the account in the past months (we are now up to 123 brains and will be close to 150 come mid-year), a new Engagement Team has been born. Our aim is to encourage a more family orientated culture in the team so watch this space for upcoming events such as Partner Breakfasts, quarterly Townhalls, Learning opportunities and much more. We want to give members on the account a busy timeline of activities to get involved in and meet more people in the team.
Contents of this month's issue:
- Leadership Spotlight
- Highlights of the Month
- Upcoming Events
- RBS in the News
- Learning & Development
- Health & Wellbeing
Guess who on the account…
Don't forget to press the "Have your say" button at the end to share your thoughts on the first issue of the newsletter - the frequency and content of the newsletter will be determined by the feedback received.
Enjoy!
leadership spotlight
A word from Ammar
Hi there … so for those of you who don’t know the back story - I joined Capco 5 years ago from Accenture, where I was in the UK Capital Markets practice. I worked on a list of front office trading and risk projects, some system design. I was lucky enough to work with some excellent teams, learnt a lot and made good friends (fair warning now that this blog is not laced with the random allegories and analogies I am sometimes associated with. I’m in a literal mood and if you were expecting more please send me a postcard)
I am now lucky enough to be working with another fantastic team on LIVING – it’s been almost a 2 year journey during which I have taken the opportunity to learn about different technologies and lean delivery. But the real story is in what the team have achieved … the scale, responsiveness and ambition of what we’ve done is awesome, and a continuing source of inspiration to me (come take a look and test our apps!).
You will have seen some of our clients starting to work in the office, it’s fair to say they love the culture and set up we have here. The couple of demos in the last week to show the latest have also generated a good amount of positivity. With a fair wind we should get to our Pilot in early H2.
To me, this is symbolic of my time at Capco and how we work… always find a way to be better and faster (though it doesn't always feel like it at the time) … We have an API into bank (who else has that?); we are work on deals like W&G (following work like NBNK); we were first for changesourcing (beating far bigger boys to it). We also have a bearded man with a rocket trying to change the world – yet have never been raided. The results speak for themselves.
The Rocket & the Marathon....
Highlights of the month
- The W&G Command & Control team have seen the Programme plan come under the fierce audit spotlight and pass with flying colours having assessed all change requests against the 10,000+ milestone plan. Not only that, the plan and hence milestones metrics are now automated and generated through our quirky visualisation tool. We continue to literally take command and control having mobilised 16+ Record Management workshops and implemented champions across all of W&G Technology
- Hardened by the pressured environment of helping set up a new bank with a total budget of £2 billion, the W&G Test & Attest team is going to new frontiers. They have been hard at it developing a programme-wide risk management approach, complete with amazing data visualisation capabilities. In the last month, they have also published three major strategy documents which will help guide the delivery plan for the new bank.
- Living has had an industrious April with designers, developers, BA’s and customer testing teams head down and hard at work in the midst of a 10-week sprint to produce another 4 new apps for the client. These apps are focussed on life events such as having a baby or planning a wedding plus an app for students and house finding game. These are complementary to the 3 core apps already developed and sit on the Living Platform. If you’re interested in seeing what the Living guys and girls are up to, just pop up to the 1st Floor of GES and come and have a play.
Alongside these larger projects sit W&G TOM, Change Management, Service Platforms and UAIM, which you will hear about in the next newsletter!
Upcoming Events
Breakfast with Alex Corsi
Contact Sara Macann if you want to get involved.
Tuesday, May 12, 2015, 09:00 AM
Hoxton Grill, London
RBS Coding Brownbag
Friday, May 22, 2015, 12:00 PM
Capco (UK) Ltd, Great Eastern Street, London, United Kingdom
RBS IN THE NEWS
- RBS and the Williams & Glyn investors announce that John Maltby will step down from his role as Chief Executive at Williams & Glyn. Read more here
- Rory Cullinan is stepping down as Head of Capital Resolutions Group just weeks after being promoted to oversee the structuring of its investment banking arm. Read here the full article
Royal Bank of Scotland warned of a tough year ahead as it aims to clear up the bulk of misconduct and litigation charges in an attempt to return the state-backed lender to profitability. Read the full article here
- Royal Bank of Scotland sold its Luxembourg-based fund management arm that oversees £20bn in assets as part of a restructuring plan to focus on the UK commercial and retail banking market. Read the full article here.
- A U.S. appeals court declined to hold Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc liable for allegedly defrauding investors in its American depositary shares by downplaying its subprime asset exposure prior to the global financial crisis. Read the full article here.
- Finishing on a high note, we should all be proud of LIving!
LEarning & Development
Capco Events
- Gravitas – 7th May
- Unconscious Bias Training – 8th May
- Consulting 101 Training – 18th-20th May
- Train the Trainer - 27th May
External Events
- Digital Shoreditch Festival – 11th May – 24th May @ Shoreditch Town Hall and various other locations around Shoreditch (Price: Range from £79 for single day pass to £599 for a full festival pass)
- Techstars FinTech Speakers Series powered by Datamonitor Financial – Part II – 12th May, 6pm-8pm @Barclays Accelerator, E1 4TT (Price: Free)
- UX beyond the Wireframe – 14th May, 6.30pm-9.30pm @ The Collective HQ, WC1B 3JA (Price: Free)
- Gone Hacking – Financial Services – 16th May-17th May @ Deloitte Digital Studio, EC1R 0EB (Price: Free)
- The Trust Game: How Data Scientists at Airbnb are Cracking the Trust Code – 21st May, 6.30pm – 7.30pm @Data Science Institute, Imperial Colleage London, SW7 2AZ (Price:Free)
- Fintech Storm Digital Money & CryptoCurrencies Special – 1st June, 6pm-9pm @ Google Campus, EC2A 4BX (Price: £45)
- Techstars FinTech Speaker Series powered by Datamonitor Financial – Part III – 2nd June, 6pm-8pm @Barclays Accelerator, E1 4TT (Price: Free)
- Fintech Storm Digital Platforms – 2nd July, 6pm-9pm @ Google Campus, EC2A 4BX (Price: £45)
health & wellbeing
A hot topic I keep coming across lately is 'mindfulness' meditation. I listened to an interesting TED Talk recently on emotional intelligence where the speaker made a compelling case that we should practice our so-called "emotional hygiene" (taking care of our emotions and our minds) with the same diligence with which we take care of our bodies. In other words, mental wellbeing is as important as physical health - you can listen to the whole talk here.
Paying more attention to the present moment – to your own thoughts and feelings, and to the world around you – can improve your mental wellbeing. Some people call this awareness 'mindfulness' meditation and has been a popular practice for hundreds of years...even science approves it.
Guess who on the account…
Had two ribs crushed by a young Jonny Wilkinson when pounded in a tackle at a school rugby match
Each month we will be providing you with a nippy fact about someone on the account and asking you to go out to your colleagues to see if you can find out who that person is. The identity of the individual will be revealed in the following month’s “Meet your colleague” section but see if you can track them down beforehand!