Director, Data Strategy & Transformation - SMBC - Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation

The Role

This role requires deep collaboration with IT, business units, and regional offices, leading cross-functional teams to drive data governance, architecture, and analytics initiatives. The individual will play a critical role in embedding a data-driven culture, optimizing data infrastructure, and maximizing the value of data assets for strategic decision-making.

• Define and implement the data strategy, ensuring alignment with global data governance frameworks and business objectives.
• Partner with business stakeholders and technology teams to gather data requirements specific to banking products, transactions, customers, reporting and analytics.
• Design scalable data architectures, enabling efficient data integration from multiple regional sources into a unified enterprise data lake.
• Design and maintain logical and physical data models that reflect core banking operations, risk management, compliance, financial reporting / analytics needs.
• Translate complex business use cases into normalized and de-normalized data structures optimized for both operational and analytical workloads.
• Guide the implementation and evolution of data marts, data warehouses, and integration layers aligned with banking architecture.
• Collaborate with development teams on physical data model deployment and performance optimization for large financial datasets.
• Ensure data models adhere to data governance, data quality, and metadata management standards across banking domains.
• Provide data architecture documentation, data dictionaries, and lineage diagrams for regulatory, audit, and business usage.
• Support data lineage, metadata management, and data quality initiatives to enhance trust and transparency in data usage.
• Contribute to data integration strategies to enable seamless access to core banking systems, regulatory systems, and analytical platforms.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Science, or a related field. Master's degree preferred.
• 15+ years of experience in data architecture, data modelling, or data management, preferably in the banking or financial services industry (must have).
• Deep knowledge of data governance (DAMA-DMBOK), data modelling, and metadata management.
• Deep expertise in logical and physical data modelling for core banking, risk, compliance, and financial reporting domains and various analytics use cases.
• Proficient in data modelling tools (e.g., Erwin, PowerDesigner, or similar).
• Advanced SQL skills and strong ability to work with large, complex financial datasets.
• Solid understanding of relational and dimensional modelling, data warehousing, and data integration techniques.
• Strong understanding of regulatory compliance in the APAC region.
• Strong collaboration, communication, and documentation skills to engage with both business and technical stakeholders.
• Work location: One@ChangiCity.