Background & Scope

A leading bank approached Armstrong Craven to improve the bench strength in the Chief Finance Officer (CFO) group. In support of the bank’s wider DE&I strategy, the project specifically focused on introducing candidates from underrepresented groups who could develop into a C-level role in the CFO group in the coming years.

Armstrong Craven was retained to support on the project with an initial talent mapping project to provide detailed organizational charts, identifying prospective talent within competitor banks’ finance leadership groups.

The second stage of the project involved confidential candidate outreach and engagement to introduce a shortlist of candidates into the bank's executive hiring process, consulting with the Chief Accounting Officer throughout the process.

The Solution

To identify suitable talent, Armstrong Craven investigated and produced organizational charts of the finance and accounting leadership teams at other global banks including:

• BNY Mellon
• Capital One
• Citibank
• Goldman Sachs
• J.P Morgan
• Morgan Stanley

The Outcome

The mapping detailed the reporting structure and biographies of over 180 finance and accounting leaders within these target competitor banks, as well as 59 profiles of underrepresented talent from other organizations and 33 current and previous signing partners from the Big4 for the listed banks.

Following a review of the identified profiles, Armstrong Craven confidentially approached a priority list of 24 profiles, conducting 16 career conversations and introducing three fully qualified candidates for interview.

This project was commissioned as a more agile and cost-effective way to identify and engage with external candidates at a senior level than a traditional executive search process. 

As well as the candidates ready at interview stage for the CFO group, the project has delivered a talent map that the executive talent acquisition group can use for future hiring at no additional cost.