FWA thanks Standard Chartered Bank for the kind sponsorship of the venue and lunch.

FWA is pleased to present the fourth chapter of our Male Champions initiative featuring FWA male champions. The focus for this chapter is - “Achieving career success in support functions”. We are bringing together a panel of Male Champions who have vast experience in operations, IT and compliance functions. This fourth chapter will featuring Iwan Zakaria, Managing Director for Blackrock, Jamie Bennett, MD and Head of Operations APAC, Markit and Neil Barry, Group Head for Compliance, Standard Chartered Bank.

FWA Singapore announced the Male Champions initiative at the annual celebration of International Women’s Day on 6 March 2015. FWA Male Champions actively support the advancement of women in their financial careers. The role of men in supporting the advancement of women is of paramount importance given that they constitute the majority of senior leadership positions and make key hiring and promotion decisions. In this regard, FWA is proud to feature selected male champions who support and are committed to the development of women.

FWA’s third dialogue session with Males from the Top - Chapter 3 was on Corporate and Investment Banking.  The Male Champions gave real cases on the reality of the working environment, suggested that supporting women in the workplace should be a business imperative, and recommended for women to put themselves forward for promotions.

Event Agenda:

Panelists’ & Moderator’s Bios:

Neil Barry
Group Head, Compliance
Standard Chartered Bank 

Neil Barry was appointed Group Head, Compliance at Standard Chartered in September 2015. 
He is based in Singapore and is responsible for setting and implementing the vision, strategy, direction and leadership for the global Compliance Function, consistent with supporting the Group’s strategic direction and growth aspiration. Neil is also responsible for promoting the culture and practice of organisational compliance standards within the Group, and to establish and maintain frameworks to manage and mitigate compliance (including regulatory and financial crime) risks. 

Before taking up the Group Head role, Neil held a number of compliance roles at Standard Chartered, most recently as Global Head, Legal & Compliance, Client Segments & Technology. Prior to joining the Bank, Neil held various roles at Citibank including General Counsel of the International Retail Bank and Wealth Management. Neil began his legal career as a litigator in private practice before moving to UBS PaineWebber as Legal Counsel. 

Neil received his Bachelor of History and Political Science Degrees from Vanderbilt University, his Juris Doctor (honours) from Case Western Reserve University, and his Master of Laws from New York University. He is married with two daughters.
 

Iwan Zakaria
Managing Director 
Blackrock

Iwan Zakwan Zakaria (known as Iwan) is an established ICT professional specializing in managing large global technology operations. He has close to 20 years of experience working with top business establishments and financial institutions, among them are Andersen Consulting where he served as CIO in South East Asia, he heads Production Services for DHL Asia Pacific with a 40 million Euro annual budget (providing infrastructure and application support) managing over 400 people in Cyberjaya, Prague and Scottsdale, served as Head of Global Infrastructure managing 200 IT professionals in Barclays Global Investors in San Francisco and Singapore. After the merger in December 2009 with Black Rock Inc, Iwan currently has the responsibility as Head of Technology Operations base in Singapore.

Notable of Iwan achievements are his many critical project successes and an example of this is in partnership with Telekom Malaysia installing the largest Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) with Deutche Post Worldnet (DHL) to deliver the Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) infrastructure for a Hyperband service with the capacity of 10 Gbps, which is a first in Malaysia in 2005. Iwan was also responsible in consolidation 25 data centers in Asia Pacific into Cyberjaya, Malaysia during his tenure as Head of Production Services between 2002 to 2006. His application support team also received the CMM (Capability Maturity Model) Level 5 certification in 2005 and 2006, and later in 2007, the Production Services team was awarded CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) Level 3.

Whilst in Andersen Consulting and later known as Accenture, he was responsible for establishing Accentures’ Bangalore delivery Center in late 1996 and was the keyperson for building the Accenture Asia Pacific IT Help Desk. He was also involve in a few client engagements which he was responsible in building up call centers for the clients.

Iwan holds a Bachelor of Science (Hons) from the National University of Malaysia. Upon his graduation he wrote a thesis on Multimediate Development which earn him a seat to pursue a Phd. Program. He did not pursue the program but instead joined the industry which he spent his first 5 years doing software development and application support.

Jamie Benett
MD and Head of Operations APAC
Markit

Jamie Bennett is a Director and Head of Operations APAC for Markit Processing, the most widely used electronic trade processing service for OTC derivative transactions in Asia. His responsibilities span client services, onboarding and custom processing activities across APAC and India.

Jamie joined Markit in Singapore in 2015 from Spark Digital New Zealand, where he held various management and operational roles in service delivery, assurance and transition.

Prior to that he was based in London where he started his fintech career with Swapswire and then, following the acquisition of Swapswire by Markit and a subsequent joint venture with the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, MarkitSERV, where he was the Global Head of Production Services until 2013.

Ms Jennifer Lewis 
Managing Director, Communications
GIC Pte Ltd

Ms Jennifer Lewis is responsible for the strategic management of GIC’s internal and external communication activities. She joined the sovereign wealth fund in 2007 after more than twenty years as a journalist with television, print and online experience. She was the founding Editor of both Straits Times TV, Singapore's first television news organisation owned by a newspaper, as well as STOMP (Straits Times Online Mobile Print), a news website that leveraged online tools to change the way news was received and distributed in Singapore. Jennifer serves on the board of the Singapore International Foundation and has been a Governor since 2007.
 

RSVP Details:

THIS IS A MEMBER AND INVITE ONLY EVENT. To join membership, please follow this link. 

As we expect this event to be very popular, seats will be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis. Please sign up early to avoid disappointment. Deadline for RSVP: 5 April 2016. We apologise that requests for places after the deadline will not be entertained. 

Members: 
FWA members attend free of charge. Please login on the website before registering.

Institutional Members: 
Diamond members - Registration at FWA member rates for up to 15 persons per Institutional Member. 
Platinum members - Registration at FWA member rates for up to 10 persons per Institutional Member. 
Gold members - Registration at FWA member rates for up to 5 persons per Institutional Member. 

Please click 'Register and register using your Institutional Codes (please check with your respective coordinators for your Institutional Code).

For enquiries, please contact please contact events@fwasg.org.