Senior VP Business Technology Officer-Wealth Management

• Senior Vice President, Business Technology Officer to lead the technology vision, strategy, and execution for our Wealth Management business line which consists of four companies that work in concert with each other. Collectively, Investments, Private Trust, Great Lakes Advisors and Chicago Deferred Exchange Company provide comprehensive brokerage and insurance, trust and estate, and portfolio management solutions. This role serves as the primary technology leader and strategic partner to the business unit’s executive leadership team, assuming responsibility for ensuring that technology, data, and digital capabilities drive business growth, operational efficiency, and customer value.
• The Business Technology Officer will shape how technology enables the business by overseeing a portfolio of platforms, applications, and services that differentiate the business unit in its markets while maintaining alignment with overall strategy, enterprise architecture, governance, information security, compliance and regulatory risk frameworks.
• This is a strategic leadership opportunity — the ideal candidate will be a technology leader who excels at the intersection of business strategy, digital innovation, and collaboration across a wide variety of business and vendor relationships. This role acts as a trusted partner to executive leadership, identifying opportunities for digital transformation, automation, data analytics, and AI-driven innovation in support of ’s overall enterprise goals. This will be accomplished through the development of IT strategic plans and roadmaps, managing project intake submissions aligned to business priorities, and enabling projects across supported business lines by engaging stakeholders through ’s Initiative Committee prioritization process.

Key Responsibilities:

• Technology Leadership
• Lead the technology vision, strategy, and execution for your assigned business units and serve as the primary technology leader and strategic partner to the business unit’s executive leadership team and their direct reports — responsible for ensuring that technology roadmaps and digital capabilities drive business growth, operational efficiency, and customer value.
• Primary consulting partner and guide to the business on technology needs
• Act as the principal IT point of contact, and business facing role, for all IT requirements as well as problem escalation and remediation for supported business lines.Act as advocate for the businesses and simplify and demystify the IT organization for the business, ensure their priorities are executed, identify appropriate, cost-effective solutions, and resolve issues in a timely and direct fashion.

• Business Unit technology oversight and alignment to Enterprise Architectural Standards and Regulatory and Risk Frameworks

Shape how technology enables the business, overseeing the support and implementation of their assigned business units’ portfolio of platforms, applications, and services that differentiate the business unit while maintaining and ensuring alignment with enterprise architecture, architectural standards review boards, data governance, regulatory, enterprise risk and information security frameworks. Review and guide along new software and applications through the Vendor Risk and Software Asset Management (SAM) intake process and ensure these align and conform to ’s standards.

• Demand Intake and Disposition
• Work with the various teams within IT and the business and facilitate a demand intake and disposition process to review initiatives and designate them as either “Projects” (significant workstreams that impact multiple lines of business that will need to be reviewed, approved and prioritized by Executive Leadership), or “Activities” that align to “Business As Usual” (BAU). Work with IT Leadership to accurately disposition these initiatives and oversee both Projects and Activities throughout their life cycle.

• Manage Risk and enforce Enterprise Standards
• Partner with Information Security and Enterprise Risk to identify and manage overall risk to the organization, by performing risk assessments and disaster recovery planning specific to the business unit’s operational landscape. Partner with IT Risk and oversee an incident handling program for your lines of business to identify and classify problems based upon priority and severity impact. Conduct root cause analysis for incidents which result in the highest priority and severity and monitor the control environment in a continuous fashion by reviewing assessment and internal audit findings and verifying the program is operating effectively. Position yourself and your team to act as enforcers across your business lines to ensure compliance with enterprise standards for data, architecture, and security.
• Business Line Portfolio Health

Oversee end-to-end technology project delivery for the business unit, including applications, enterprise operations, data management, information security, and vendor risk management including the tracking and management of key performance indicators (KPIs), key risk indicators (KRIs), and other measures of application and project health.

• Vendor ManagementAssist in the management of the vendor relationships and partner with the IT Chief of Staff and IT Contract team to ensure a clear understanding of their contractual agreements with and of the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in place. Consult with the business on the appropriate SLAs as they negotiate new contracts, as appropriate.

• Financial Management of IT Services

Partner with the Business Unit CFOs, ’s Enterprise CFO, and both Finance and IT team members supporting budgets to ensure that projects and costs are aligned to Executive Leadership’s approved budget estimates and keep project costs and timelines aligned. Understand and communicate to the business the services where IT allocates costs back to the business units and assist with budget developments and updates as needed.

• Resource Capacity Planning

Partner with members of the IT Leadership team to secure, allocate, deploy and manage IT resources to support individual business unit initiatives. Manage vendor, contractor and employee capacity and resource conflicts through prioritization and alignment of initiatives to overall enterprise and business unit goals.

Skills and Qualifications:

• 10+ years of experience in a senior Technology leadership role
• Knowledge of software development life cycle (SDLC) and quality assurance processes
• Proven experience in managing large-scale technology initiatives from intake to execution and completion (including P&L responsibilities)
• Excellent leadership, organizational, and interpersonal skills; must be able to communicate effectively with senior leadership
• Ability to communicate complex technical information to business stakeholders in a meaningful manner
• Strong problem-solving and decision-making skills
• Familiarity with project management tools (e.g., Clarity, Jira, Adobe Workfront) and IT Service Management tools (ServiceNOW)

Preferred Qualifications:

• Industry standard certifications such as ISACA’s Certified in the Governance of Enterprise IT (CGEIT), or related certifications from NIST, ISC2, ITIL, PMI and others is preferred
• Familiarity with cloud technologies, DevOps, and Continuous Integration Continuous Deployment (CICD) practices is preferred
• Experience with managing and mitigating IT Risk in the highly regulated financial services industry: familiarity with industry standard frameworks such as NIST, ISACA COBIT, PCI DSS, and others is a plus; familiarity with banking and security regulations and privacy laws such as the CCPA, CPRA, GDPR, RDARR and others is preferred
• Experience working in a business-facing senior leadership role
• Experience in leading remote or geographically distributed teams and consulting partners
• A Masters degree in Computer Science, Information Systems and/or an MBA is a plus