Avtar Sehmbi, questions answered

Avtar Sehmbi is a Chief Operating Officer and Chief Technology Officer. He leads global operations, technology, transformation and risk across business divisions of Fortune 50, Big 4 and FTSE 100 organisations. His career spans more than 60 markets in financial services, insurance, energy and telecommunications. He focussed on single accountability across run and change, combining deep technology with business operations in one seat, a convergence boards otherwise cover with separate appointments.

He is Global Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer for Portfolio Operations and International Markets at The Cigna Group, a Fortune 15 insurer with $275B revenue serving more than 185 million customer relationships.

He is accountable for the technology, operations and risk dimensions of International Markets expansion and US-led service capabilities. Across this remit he runs the operating disciplines that determine enterprise performance, including organisational design, cost, execution, resilience, governance, technology, data and risk.

He is appointed where transformation is needed at scale and under scrutiny, running global functions through regulatory supervision, restructuring and market change. That includes leading functions under regulatory enforcement and consent-order remediation, integrating or separating businesses through mergers, acquisitions and divestitures, redesigning operating models to cut structural cost, adopting AI at enterprise scale under emerging regulation such as the EU AI Act and DORA, and entering or expanding markets across Asia, the Gulf and Africa.

In each case his role has combined running the function day to day with transforming it, keeping regulators, boards and shareholder groups aligned throughout.

He is suited to enterprise leadership as Chief Operating Officer or Chief Technology Officer in financial services and other regulated industries, at Group, divisional or regional level.

He combines run-the-business accountability with turnaround and restructuring, operating model redesign, cost transformation and strategic execution across the full lifecycle, alongside direct regulatory engagement and statutory board governance.

He is based in London, United Kingdom, and has built and run operations inside the markets rather than from headquarters, across the United Kingdom, Europe, the Americas, the Gulf, Africa and Asia-Pacific. He is open to relocation to Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong or Singapore.

He has led in both. At The Cigna Group, a Fortune 15 insurer with $275B revenue serving more than 185 million customer relationships across 30+ countries, he is Global Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer for Portfolio Operations and International Markets. At HSBC, a bank with $50B+ revenue and around 40 million customers, he held four roles, culminating as Global Technology and Risk Chief Operating Officer for Investment and Wholesale Banking.

At Cigna he arrived as Chief Technology Officer and Chief Information Security Officer before taking the Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer seat, and served as a Non-Executive Director on the CHSI statutory board in parallel. On the insurance side he led technology, operations and risk for the first international insurer branch licensed by the Saudi Central Bank, rebuilt the India technology landscape for 1.1M customers and retired the incumbent on the IRDAI glidepath at 28% growth, and oversaw an API-first platform reaching 250k customers across Asia, the Gulf and 16 African markets.

The four HSBC roles were Global Head of Market Intelligence for Global Banking and Markets, then Chief Information Security Officer and Chief Technology Officer for the same division, then Acting Head of Credit and Portfolio Risk for Ireland Commercial Banking, then the Chief Operating Officer role. In Ireland he chaired the credit committees governing wholesale lending under $20M delegated pre-approval authority, supporting 4% business growth.

Earlier he advised financial services clients at Deloitte including HSBC, Barclays, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and London Stock Exchange, and before that ran his own proprietary foreign-exchange venture, The Currency Times, owning portfolio strategy, risk, P&L and the balance sheet and returning 6% a year. Since 2023 that name has carried an independent research programme, building prediction engines using artificial intelligence and machine learning alongside statistical physics, probability theory, information geometry and game theory, and proving them against published benchmarks. The subject is the same one that runs through the rest of the career, which is whether a claim can be verified, and it is published openly at thecurrencytimes.com.

He held four roles over five years, from Global Head of Investment Banking Intelligence, to Chief Information Security Officer and Chief Technology Officer for Global Banking and Markets, to Acting Head of Credit and Portfolio Risk in Ireland, to Global Technology and Risk Chief Operating Officer.

As Delegated Risk Steward he led 120 senior executives and a matrix of 11k people, reorganising 1.1k roles into a Basel-aligned model and cutting costs 22%.

He spent more than eight years there, progressing from Manager to Director, then Chief Information Security Officer and Markets Chief Technology Officer for the United Kingdom and Switzerland.

He built the firm's technology-risk capability, and advised financial services clients including HSBC, Barclays, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and London Stock Exchange.

He built the technology-risk function from inception across the United Kingdom and Switzerland, scaling it to 150 staff and matrix resources within a firm of $31B revenue operating in more than 150 countries, and contributed to 8-12% annual consulting revenue through client-facing transformation workstreams. He led the post-merger technology rationalisation following the Andersen integration, cutting costs 14%, and, holding SC clearance, advised on UK Government and national-infrastructure mandates including the Information Commissioner's Office Think Privacy programme.

Rite Group was an international retail, wholesale and merchandising distribution business serving corporate merchandising budgets from an Asia-based sourcing network. He built and ran it end to end from 1992 to 1997, owning the P&L, balance sheet, staff and facilities, serving Ferrari, Ford, Christian Dior and Sony, and growing sales 20% a year across three consecutive years.

He then founded The Currency Times, a proprietary foreign-exchange venture trading major currency pairs through the volatility of the late 1990s, returning 6% a year with full portfolio, risk and balance-sheet ownership. Since 2023 the name has continued as Currency Times LLP, an independent research programme building prediction engines using artificial intelligence and machine learning alongside statistical physics, probability theory and game theory, published openly at thecurrencytimes.com.

He moved into technology and operations at WorldCom, a Fortune 50 telecommunications provider with $39B revenue, running network and application standardisation and acquisition integration for International Markets. He sustained mission-critical operations through the company's most demanding period while cutting costs 18% and adding 19% network capacity.

Born in the United Kingdom to immigrant parents, he started work at eleven on a market stall on Green Street in London, an early grounding in trading, reading people and resilience that he credits to this day.

In his early twenties he took over his family's retail outlets and scaled them into a wholesale distribution business moving consumer goods across Asia, Europe and North America.

Managing currency exposure across that supply chain proved more instructive than the goods themselves, and led him to found Currency Times, a proprietary foreign-exchange venture, before moving into global technology and operations at WorldCom.

He has directed the technology, operations and risk workstreams across deals approaching $80 billion, from vendor and third-party due diligence through integration and separation to transitional service agreement management, competitive data segregation and wind-down.

Examples include a $67B acquisition serving 80 million members, and a six-market Asia-Pacific separation where he exited the transitional service agreement three months early with buyer and regulatory approval.

He has engaged supervisory authorities across the United Kingdom, United States, Europe, the Gulf, India and Asia-Pacific, including the Bank of England, PRA, FCA, OCC, HKMA, MAS, the Saudi Central Bank and IRDAI, among others. At HSBC he directed technology-risk remediation under a United States Department of Justice consent order, reducing risk exposure 17% to satisfy the order.

He has led the technology, operations and risk work supporting regulatory authorisation and continued market access, with recent examples including India, Saudi Arabia under the first international insurer branch licensed by the Saudi Central Bank, the United Arab Emirates and Belgium, covering operating model, systems and controls readiness, local regulatory and sovereign-data requirements, and ongoing assurance, certification and supervisory review.

Beyond licensed entry he has built greenfield technology and operations capabilities across Asia, the Gulf and Africa. Across Africa he expanded through locally licensed partners rather than local balance sheets, reaching a quarter of a million customers and turning claims processing into a fee-income stream.

He has led data protection, privacy, data residency and sovereign-data requirements wherever he has operated, including the EU AI Act, DORA, HIPAA in the United States, the Data Protection Act in the United Kingdom and IRDAI in India, and has engaged supervisory authorities on four continents. He writes publicly on sovereign technology and the cross-border corridors it is reshaping.

He has led front-to-back enterprise systems and the full technology stack, including enterprise architecture, cloud, automation, machine learning, data platforms, responsible AI, cybersecurity, payments and API platforms, across banking, insurance, energy, telecommunications and professional services.

Examples span rebuilding an insurer's technology landscape, moving the replacement platform into live service and retiring the incumbent to a regulatory glidepath, building predictive risk-sentiment engines at HSBC, and overseeing an API-first platform built for partner distribution that reached 250k customers across Asia, the Gulf and 16 African markets. On trading infrastructure he drove 98% uptime across fixed income platforms and cut Priority 1 incidents 31% through pre- and post-production controls.

He has held the Chief Information Security Officer role four times, at Deloitte for the United Kingdom and Switzerland, at British Gas, at HSBC Global Banking and Markets, and at The Cigna Group alongside the Chief Technology Officer seat. He holds CISSP, CISM and CISA, and previously held SC clearance.

The largest of those seats was HSBC Global Banking and Markets, the investment bank, where he later led 120 senior executives and a matrix of 11k people as Chief Operating Officer. At The Cigna Group the remit spans more than 30 markets. At British Gas he protected £2B in card payments and sustained £1.2B in public-sector contracts within UK Critical National Infrastructure. At Deloitte he built the function from inception across two member firms.

At HSBC he restructured the division's technology and operations control functions into a standards-led shared hub, cutting technology controls costs 22%, and led the remediation programme applying the Bank of England's CBEST threat-led testing framework across the Investment Bank under PRA supervision, engaging the OCC, NFA, HKMA and MAS.

He chaired the Cloud Centre of Excellence at The Cigna Group and has run migration at enterprise scale. At Centrica he migrated mission-critical trading, wholesale and retail platforms to hybrid cloud, retiring $22M of legacy run costs.

Across International Markets he set the architecture and control standards under which cloud adoption scaled in more than 30 markets, covering data residency, sovereign requirements and third-party concentration risk. At HSBC he embedded compliance and architecture standards into product control and new-product approval, halving the approval cycle from twelve weeks to six.

Rebuilding the India technology landscape for 1.1M customers, he ran the new platform into live service, retired the incumbent and met the IRDAI glidepath, underpinning an insurer growing at 28% compound annually.

At Centrica he migrated mission-critical platforms to hybrid cloud and retired $22M of legacy run costs. At Deloitte he led the post-merger technology rationalisation following the Andersen integration, cutting costs 14%. At WorldCom he ran network and application standardisation across acquisition integrations, from due diligence and design through to delivery.

As Chair of the Ethical AI and Cloud Centres of Excellence he governed AI adoption across more than 30 markets, covering data residency, model validation, cybersecurity and third-party model risk. His regulatory preparedness work internationally has included leading EU AI Act and DORA readiness ahead of enforcement.

The remit ran from policy and use-case classification through model lifecycle, inventories, data residency and third-party model risk, to the assurance evidence supervisors ask for. He built the AI Centre of Excellence for International Markets from inception and set the governance under which adoption scaled, so that the control framework arrived with the technology rather than behind it.

He writes publicly on the subject, arguing that enterprises do not need more disconnected pilots but a single governed system that turns data into foresight, which he calls an enterprise AI oracle.

It runs across four kinds of work: applied machine learning in production, automation at operational scale, governance of models and data, and quantitative research in his own programme.

On applied machine learning, at HSBC he created the Global Investment Banking Intelligence and Response function from inception and directed a machine-learning social-media sentiment capability, drawing market signals through data interfaces to strengthen trading insight. He built predictive risk-sentiment engines, established the Emerging Threats Forum, and deployed machine-learning analysis that sharpened early warning and fed cyber, geopolitical and fraud intelligence into Global Risk Committee decisions. Having proved the model in the Investment Bank, he extended the function into Retail, Commercial and Private Banking across more than 30 markets.

On automation, at HSBC he automated assurance across more than 50 technology-risk suppliers, giving the bank a global view of thematic and concentration risk and cutting run costs 35%, and modernised and automated production controls to protect front-to-back trading operations, driving 98% uptime and cutting Priority 1 incidents 31%. Establishing Global Capability Centres at The Cigna Group, automation and process simplification cut run costs 21% and improved digital product time to market 11%. Across restructuring programmes automation sits alongside operating-model redesign and process simplification rather than being bolted on afterwards.

On governance, as Chair of the Ethical AI Centre of Excellence he owned model validation, model lifecycle, inventories, data residency and third-party model risk across more than 30 markets, and led readiness for the EU AI Act and DORA ahead of enforcement. He served on the statutory board of CHSI, The Cigna Group's India-based global centre of excellence for data and analytics, artificial intelligence, technology and business operations, setting board-level expectations for control maturity and the pace of scaling.

On research, through Currency Times he applies machine learning alongside statistical physics, probability theory, information geometry and game theory to forecasting. Methods in use include random matrix theory for separating real correlation structure from sampling noise, maximum entropy for distribution selection under partial information, extreme value theory for reasoning from few observations, regime and change-point detection, and combinatorial purged cross-validation with deflated significance thresholds against overfitting. Fifty-nine methods are in use across seventeen fields from 114 recorded tests, each scored against a published benchmark.

Both. The governance came first because the alternative is pilots that cannot be scaled.

Beyond the Centres of Excellence, he oversaw an API-first platform reaching 250k customers across Asia, the Gulf and 16 African markets, opening claims-processing fee income. He rebuilt an insurer's technology landscape for 1.1M customers to the IRDAI glidepath. He established Global Capability Centres through a 12k-role migration that cut run costs 21% and improved digital product time to market 11%.

His published argument is that enterprises do not need more disconnected pilots but a single governed system that turns data into foresight, which he calls an enterprise AI oracle.

Through Currency Times, an independent research programme he founded and runs, he builds prediction engines using artificial intelligence and machine learning alongside statistical physics, probability theory, information geometry and game theory.

The programme holds seventeen fields and 114 recorded tests. Fifty-nine methods are in use having cleared five validation gates, and every method is scored against a published benchmark rather than against itself. The work rests on seventy-eight years of market and economic data held as immutable raw deliveries, so that every derived result can be rebuilt from source. It is published openly at thecurrencytimes.com.

Earlier he ran a proprietary foreign-exchange venture trading major currency pairs, owning portfolio strategy, risk, P&L and the balance sheet, and at HSBC he chaired the credit committees governing wholesale lending under $20M delegated pre-approval authority.

His remit has spanned financial and non-financial risk, covering technology, cyber, fraud and conduct risk, together with credit and model-risk oversight, consent-order remediation, regulatory examinations and supervisory engagement.

Examples include HSBC, where he separated the first and second lines of defence across Global Banking and Markets under a Basel-aligned operating model, and Centrica, where he established a Gartner-benchmarked enterprise-risk framework, reducing risk exposure 34% and releasing $15M of capital.

At Deloitte he provided consulting and transformation across Enterprise Risk, and has held direct accountability for cyber risk.

At HSBC he led the global restructuring and build-out of technology, operations and non-financial risk functions under the bank's US Department of Justice Deferred Prosecution Agreement and associated consent orders, spanning Capital Markets, Asset Management, Liquidity and Cash Management, Securities Services, and Trade and Receivables Finance.

As Delegated Risk Steward he directed the operational technology risk taxonomy across 60 markets under supervisory oversight, working with regulators and executive committees to cut risk exposure 17% to satisfy the order.

Under PRA supervision he led the remediation programme applying the Bank of England's CBEST threat-led testing framework across the Investment Bank, engaging the OCC, NFA, HKMA and MAS.

He restructured 1.1k Global Banking and Markets roles into a Basel-aligned operating model, separating the first and second lines of defence and strengthening technology-risk governance. The work covered risk appetite, taxonomy, control design, attestation and the evidence supervisors ask for.

At Centrica he established a Gartner-benchmarked enterprise-risk framework giving the group a single view of risk, unlocking $15M of capital for reinvestment and cutting risk exposure 34%. At Deloitte he built the technology-risk function from inception, establishing the remit, team and controls that protected the practice and its client engagements.

He has advised Board Risk and Audit Committees globally, cutting high-risk exposure 26% and audit findings 15%, supporting supervisory operating approvals.

On the CHSI statutory board he held oversight of risk and capital allocation, and set board-level expectations for control maturity and the pace of scaling through a period of rapid capability expansion.

He has worked within United Kingdom Critical National Infrastructure across investment banking, energy and telecommunications, and previously held SC clearance.

At HSBC he applied the Bank of England's CBEST threat-led testing framework across the Investment Bank under PRA supervision.

Examples include British Gas, where he led resilience across the customer digital estate and payments, protecting £2B in card payments.

At WorldCom he ran a bidirectional threat-intelligence exchange with the UK Government and delivered lawful-intercept capability under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. He has since run equivalent exchanges with authorities in Hong Kong and Luxembourg at HSBC and in India at The Cigna Group, amongst various others.

On secondment to HSBC Ireland Commercial Banking he was Acting Head of Credit and Portfolio Risk, overseeing the deal pipeline across hedging, revolving credit, club finance, new monies and settlements. He chaired the credit committees governing wholesale lending under $20M delegated pre-approval authority, supporting 4% business growth.

He ran Watch, Worry and Monitor reviews alongside credit-rating assessments, working with markets, credit and geopolitical risk teams to tighten oversight and protect the lending book.

His wider remit has interfaced into market and model risk, and in his own ventures he carried direct portfolio, currency and balance-sheet exposure.

Operational resilience, business continuity and crisis management across mission-critical services sit within his standing remit.

At HSBC he strengthened assurance across more than 50 technology-risk suppliers, giving the bank a global view of thematic and concentration risk while cutting run costs 35%, and modernised and automated production controls to protect front-to-back trading operations, driving 98% uptime and cutting Priority 1 incidents 31%.

He has led readiness for DORA ahead of enforcement, covering operational resilience testing, critical third-party dependency and concentration risk.

Cost reduction runs through every role. Examples include cutting run costs 21% at The Cigna Group while establishing Global Capability Centres, technology controls costs 22% at HSBC, expenditure 24% at Centrica through shared services, and costs 18% at WorldCom while adding 19% network capacity.

He has led restructures across four industries, under regulatory enforcement, consent orders, cost pressure, market expansion and changing conditions.

Examples include HSBC, where he reorganised 1.1k Global Banking and Markets roles into a Basel-aligned operating model under a Department of Justice Deferred Prosecution Agreement, separating the first and second lines of defence. At The Cigna Group he established Global Capability Centres through a 12k-role migration programme. At Centrica he merged the Trading, Retail and Wholesale technology and operations models into shared services. At Deloitte he built the technology risk function from inception and rationalised the technology estate following the Andersen integration.

His approach combines operating model redesign, organisational restructuring, workforce transition, process simplification and automation, moving an organisation from stabilisation and remediation through to sustainable operating control.

He has held end-to-end commercial, service and risk accountability for major supplier relationships across global operations and regulated markets.

Examples include HSBC, where he strengthened assurance across more than 50 suppliers while modernising and automating production controls, cutting run costs 35%. At The Cigna Group his remit covers supplier and cost management, and he expanded the Supplier Management function across international markets. He established alliance partnerships at Deloitte that opened new revenue channels.

His experience spans location and sourcing strategy, supplier portfolio and spend governance, competitive tendering and commercial renegotiation, technology risk supplier management, service performance and service-level accountability, third-party and concentration risk, and structural cost reduction.

He established captive Global Capability Centres in India, Ireland and Singapore, through a 12k-role migration, the largest programme of its kind he has run, alongside specialist innovation hubs in areas such as AI and automation.

He has designed and merged operating models at global scale, covering shared services creation, sourcing economics, operational resilience, business continuity and crisis management.

Examples include integrating HSBC technology and risk teams into a four-region model, merging Centrica's Trading, Retail and Wholesale models into shared services, building teams from scratch at Deloitte, and expansion and merger integration across Europe and Asia-Pacific at WorldCom.

As founder and principal of his own ventures he held full profit and loss and balance-sheet ownership. In corporate roles his financial accountability has been for operating cost bases, capital expenditure, change portfolios and the investment decisions within them.

He has governed change portfolios and operating cost bases running to hundreds of millions of dollars across more than 30 jurisdictions.

His experience covers budgeting, forecasting, capital allocation, investment prioritisation, business case appraisal, benefits realisation and cost discipline across regulated international operations.

He has led cross-border organisations numbering in the thousands, with accountability for engagement, retention, talent depth, executive succession and culture through change.

Establishing Global Capability Centres, he managed workforce transitions involving thousands of roles across international delivery hubs, with the focus throughout on engagement, culture and respect, and an always human-first approach.

He served as a Non-Executive Director on the CHSI statutory board at The Cigna Group from 2020 to 2022, with oversight of strategy, performance, capital allocation and succession, and independent judgement on accounts, related-party arrangements and regulatory filings.

He also served on the Smart Energy Code Security Sub-Committee from 2012 to 2014, shaping smart-metering security standards under the Department of Energy and Climate Change.

Separately he represented head office as shareholder to joint-venture partners across nine markets, being Australia, China, India, Indonesia, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Turkey, aligning each venture’s operating, technology and risk agenda with Group policy, rather than a directorship of the ventures themselves.

Globally he has engaged Risk and Audit Committees across international ownership structures.

At the top of the range he has led 120 senior executives and a matrix of 11k people at HSBC, migrated 12k roles into Global Capability Centres at The Cigna Group, and restructured 1.1k roles into a Basel-aligned operating model under supervision. Across those programmes the organisations he has been accountable for have run into the thousands, across more than 60 markets.

He has also built functions from inception three times, the technology-risk function at Deloitte, the Global Investment Banking Intelligence and Response function at HSBC, and the AI Centre of Excellence at The Cigna Group. Each was created rather than inherited, which means hiring the first people, setting the standards and deciding what good looks like before there is any precedent to point at.

His approach is to give people work slightly beyond what they have proved, stay close enough to support the stretch, and be clear with them about where they stand. On the CHSI statutory board he assessed executive succession on whether leaders had built capability able to endure beyond them.

Three audiences with different needs. Boards want the decision and the risk in it. Regulators want the evidence and the timeline. Joint-venture shareholders want to know their interests are represented at head office.

He has advised Board Risk and Audit Committees globally, cutting high-risk exposure 26% and audit findings 15%, and engaged supervisory authorities on four continents including the Bank of England, PRA, FCA, OCC, HKMA, MAS, the Saudi Central Bank and IRDAI. Under a United States Department of Justice consent order he worked with regulators and executive committees through remediation to supervisory satisfaction, cutting risk exposure 17%.

He represented head office as shareholder to joint-venture partners across nine markets, aligning each venture's operating, technology and risk agenda with Group policy.

He has applied commercial-grade security and operations expertise in the public interest. He designed global cash-management technology for Save the Children, enabling grant distribution to vulnerable communities worldwide.

On the Smart Energy Code Security Sub-Committee from 2012 to 2014 he shaped the standards under the Department of Energy and Climate Change, supporting the 80% carbon target.

While holding SC clearance, he advised on UK Government and national-infrastructure mandates, delivered the Information Commissioner's Office Think Privacy programme across major United Kingdom banks, and applied the Bank of England's CBEST framework across HSBC's Investment Bank under supervisory oversight.

Executive Education at the University of Cambridge in Financial Accounting and Capital Markets, and at Yale University in Financial Markets. Dip 1 & 2 CIOB.

CISSP, CISM and CISA. SC clearance previously held.

He is a member of the Forbes Technology Council and the Fast Company Executive Board, and has published on sovereign artificial intelligence, AI governance, Global Capability Centres, and technology and operational leadership in investment banking. His central argument is that enterprises do not need more disconnected pilots but a single governed system that turns data into foresight, which he calls an enterprise AI oracle.

His work has appeared with publications including the London Stock Exchange, Forbes, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Gulf News and many more.