Building a European centre of excellence for a leading global bank

The client   

Our client is an international banking group offering a wide range of financial services to businesses and individuals, facilitating trade, investment and wealth management across various industries. Its focus is on providing solutions for clients looking to manage and invest their finances safely, grow their wealth and businesses, and unlock sustainable, inclusive growth opportunities across 52 global markets, primarily Asia, Africa and the Middle East.  

The opportunity  

“In order to deliver an outsourced compliance as a service solution in a region we’d never worked in before, we had to demonstrate our capability and the quality of our network. By building relationships with Poland-based compliance and FS professionals with the right experience and skillset to work with a bank of this scale, we were able to deliver this crucial hub to support the client’s global operations.” Matthew Eames, Founder and Group CEO, Eames Group 

The client approached Eames Group in March 2018 looking to establish a Western European Group Business Services Hub in Warsaw, Poland, supporting its operations in the US, UK and other European countries. This was essentially an excellence centre for financial crime analysis and KYC processes.  

The new operation would go live in September 2018, initially with a holding location, before moving to a new purpose-built premises in 2020 with a capacity to hold up to 1,000 people.   

The solution  

Utilising our reach in Europe, we set about building our network of high-quality compliance and financial services professionals based in Poland, with proven experience of working for global banks. After proving our capability over the next two months, we were awarded key strategic partnership approval status in May 2018 to deliver the early stage build out of this greenfield site through an onsite and offsite campaign from our London office, using our solutions team and dedicated Polish delivery team.  

We were engaged exclusively for FCC roles across IT operations, HR operations, and treasury and liquidity risk. As well as building out the client’s teams for its new excellence centre, we supplied relevant market intelligence to help them keep track of competitor activity and the local talent landscape.  

 The result  

During the remainder of 2018, we established FCC, HR support services, information security and IT operations (change) functions, and in 2019 we set up legal COE, risk, corporate and institutional banking, finance (treasury), private banking and wealth.  

In total, we arranged over 600 interviews and assessments, and made a total of 151 placements in the client’s Western European Group Business Services Hub, with a focus on FCC and FCSU. These included leadership placements such as a treasury analytics team lead, compliance director, hub head of financial crime operation, head of transaction monitoring and managing director – head FCSU NCB.  

Over the next year, we continued to support the client with their hiring, ensuring 95% of hires remained engaged, and provided employee value proposition (EVP) feedback. 

If you’re looking for a new opportunity or would like to discuss how we can help you put the right talent solution in place for your organisation, please contact me at ed.oconnell@eames-group.com