JTC Group has appointed Shivaji Dasgupta as Chief Technology and AI Officer, a new senior role at the professional services business, and has promoted Adam Jeffries to Chief Transformation Officer in the same announcement.
Dasgupta joins JTC from the banking sector, where he spent much of his career in technology leadership, most recently at Deutsche Bank. He is based in Ruesselsheim in Germany. In the new post he takes responsibility for the group's technology direction and for the way artificial intelligence is applied across its service lines, reporting into the group's senior leadership.
Jeffries moves into a newly created group-wide transformation role after more than a decade at the firm. He joined JTC in 2013 and has served as Group Chief Information Officer, a post he vacates on taking up the transformation brief. The two appointments are presented by the company as a single strengthening of its technology and change capability rather than as separate hires.
The appointments matter because JTC sits in a part of the financial services industry where technology is becoming the main axis of competition. Fund administrators and corporate services providers handle large volumes of investor records, regulatory reporting and client onboarding, work that is labour intensive and increasingly exposed to automation. Creating a combined technology and artificial intelligence post at group level, rather than leaving AI inside the information technology function, signals that the firm intends to treat it as a strategic rather than an operational question.
JTC provides fund, corporate and private client services to institutional and private clients from offices across Europe, the Americas, Asia and the Middle East. The group was listed in London until its acquisition by Permira completed earlier this year, and it now reports as a privately held business, which removes the regulatory news service as a channel for announcements of this kind and makes the company newsroom the primary record.
JTC employs several thousand staff and administers assets for institutional investors, family offices and listed clients, and its growth over the past decade has come through a combination of organic expansion and acquisition. Integrating acquired books of business onto common systems is one of the standing operational challenges in the sector, and it is the kind of work that falls to a transformation function.
For chief executives and chief operating officers across fund administration, trust and corporate services, the structure of the appointment is the detail worth noting. A chief technology and AI officer sitting alongside a chief transformation officer separates the question of what the technology can do from the question of how the organisation changes to use it, and the two roles will be judged on whether that separation speeds delivery or adds a layer between them.
