Purpose of the role:
The Technology Application Services Manager is accountable for the architectural integrity, operational support, service continuity, and long-term health of the Bank's business applications. The role owns portfolio rationalization, internal application support, vendor-provided support, vendor management, and leadership of the Application Services team.
B. ROLE ACCOUNTABILITIES
RESPONSIBILITIES:
Application Ownership & Solution Architecture
- Own solution design and architecture across the Bank's business applications estate.
- Hold design authority and provide sign-off on proposed solutions, upgrades, and customizations.
- Define and enforce integration and API standards across the portfolio, maintaining architectural coherence between systems.
- Partner with the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Lead and Delivery Leads on cross-domain initiatives.
Portfolio Health & Rationalization
- Maintain an ongoing view of the applications portfolio's health, identifying underperforming systems, technical debt, and enhancement, upgrade, or replacement requirements.
- Translate findings into recommendations that feed budget and roadmap planning.
Deployment, Release & Quality Management
- Establish and maintain a DevOps methodology and toolset spanning version control and build management.
- Hold vendors accountable for build and release quality.
- Ensure application health monitoring and operational support controls are in place, with accountability for uptime, incident rates, support performance, and service improvement across the estate.
Application Support & Vendor Management
- Own the end-to-end application support model across the estate, covering support delivered internally by the Application Services team and support provided by vendors or other third parties.
- Ensure incidents, service requests, recurring problems, and user issues are triaged, investigated, resolved, escalated, and communicated in line with agreed service levels.
- Act as the senior escalation point for application support issues, coordinating internal technical resources and vendors through to resolution and ensuring root-cause analysis and corrective actions are completed.
- Manage vendor-provided support, including support agreements, SLAs, service performance, escalations, and value for money.
Budget & Portfolio Planning
- Own the annual applications budget, linking funding requirements to portfolio rationalization findings.
Delivery Support
- Provide technical input and estimates during planning.
- Ensure environments, builds and integration points are ready ahead of milestones.
- Ensure quality gates are met before release.
People Leadership
- Manage, develop and lead the Application Services team.
- Own hiring input, performance management and development planning.
- Establish cross-training to reduce key-man dependency.
- Foster technical excellence and ownership.
C. KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS (KPI)
To measure and monitor the performance of the role in the context of the Section/Department's activities
- System uptime & incident rates (estate-wide)
- Architecture standards adherence
- Portfolio health & rationalization
- Internal and vendor-provided application support performance
- Vendor performance, SLA compliance & cost
- Portfolio & budget management
- Team capability & engagement
D. EXPERIENCE, QUALIFICATIONS & SKILLS
Minimum Experience & Essential Knowledge
- 15 years progressive experience in Information Technology, with at least 5 years in a people leadership / team lead capacity
- Financial services background in a similar environment (investment management, core banking, or private wealth) in a lead capacity is a mandatory requirement
- Experience within a bank, investment firm, or other regulated financial services environment
- Expertise across core banking, CRM/ERP, integration/middleware, and investment management platforms desirable (e.g. T24/Temenos, Microsoft Dynamics)
- Proven experience in solution architecture and integration/API design across enterprise applications
- Experience establishing and maturing DevOps practices, including deployment governance and release management
- Experience leading internal application support operations and managing vendor-provided support, including incident, problem, request, escalation, and SLA management
Minimum Entry Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related discipline
Certifications desirable:
- Temenos T24 certification
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 certification
- TOGAF
- ITIL Foundation
- Azure/cloud DevOps certification
