Job Title : CIO

Organization : Alliance & Leicester

What they say about him: “A great coup for Alliance & Leicester.”

Ian Buchanan joined UK bank Alliance & Leicester in 2005 with the task of helping turn the company into the UK’s leading direct bank with a high-street presence. Buchanan is currently leading a major transformation of the group’s technology and processing strategy as the bank moves towards this model of acquiring and servicing customers through direct channels.

That transformation includes recent deals with Accenture, to replace core banking systems, and BT, to implement a converged IP hosted voice and data network.

Buchanan’s background is firmly rooted in investment banking and, prior to Alliance & Leicester, he spent 17 years working in technology and operations roles at various Japanese, Swiss and US banks – most recently at Nomura international as CIO and then COO, where he led a ground-breaking, component-based computing framework called Hoodini (the ‘highly object-oriented development at Nomura International’).

Buchanan is a physics graduate from Durham University. He spent his early career working in IT development and consultancy roles in the oil and drinks industries.