Eelko van Leeuwen - CIO of ABN Amro Clearing Bank - Leadership Deep Dive. Part 2
For the last 5 years Eelko van Leeuwen has been the CIO of ABN Amro Clearing Bank, which clears and finances over 16 million trades per day and covers 90 of the world's leading exchanges. It guarantees that agreements between all sides of transactions in financial markets are honoured. Eeelko has led two impressive, massive transformation programs - integrating and unifying backoffice systems for all 4 regions of the Bank's trading systems, and developing an ingenious Banking as a Service platform - a blockchain-based service that backs fintechs with a banking license that they otherwise wouldn't have.
When the whole industry was either competing with or buying out fintechs, ABN Amro decided to partner with them to make ABN indispensable. In this conversation with Hendrik Deckers, Eeelko talks about the future of CIO (will that role disappear as technology savviness is becoming a norm among business leaders?), about surrounding himself with people he considers smarter than him and embracing his role as a facilitator for professional development, about lessons learned from buddhism, about automation and the future in general.