Tesco Banks lands Balmer as new chief information officer
Tesco Bank has hired Gary Balmer as its new chief information officer (CIO).
He will be replacing Gary Tucker who retired after five years in the post at the Edinburgh-headquartered business.
Gary Balmer, Tesco Bank
Balmer has spent time in the IT divisions of Sainsbury’s, IBM, New Look, and PwC. Prior to his arrival at Tesco Bank, he held the role of group technology director at GHL.
The bank says that Balmer arrives equipped with “a very strong technology change, transformation and data background, as well as very relevant retail experience in the customer digital journey”.
“We are delighted to welcome Gary to the team at this exciting time for Tesco Bank,” says David Bowerman, chief operations officer at Tesco Bank.
Founded in 1997, Tesco Bank employs around 3,900 people and claims that 440 of that number are assigned to its IT division.
It announced the creation of 120 new technology and change roles across its Edinburgh and Newcastle offices in January. 100 of the new roles will be based in Edinburgh and 20 in Newcastle.
These new roles are in addition to 20 jobs created when Tesco Bank announced Newcastle as the home for a new technology hub in November 2019.
The bank reported an operating profit of £197 million for 2019 – a 16.6% growth. It paid out around £16 million to customers that same year as redress for the Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) scandal.
Lending balances rose 7.8% year-on-year to £12.4 billion, comprising £3.8 billion secured lending (up 25%) and £8.7 billion unsecured lending (up 1.8%).
The bank uses Fiserv’s Signature core banking system. Its mortgage origination and servicing software is provided by Capita Mortgage Software Solutions (formerly Vertex Financial Services).
For credit card processing, the bank uses the TS2 processing platform provided by TSYS.
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