STEWART ALLAN - Chief Digital and Information Officer

100% Digital, 100% Human

Trust, Technology and the Future of Private Banking

Most banks chase the same destination: a fully digital, heavily automated operating model where the cheapest interaction is the one that never involves a human. Stewart Allan, CIO of Weatherbys Private Bank, is running in a different direction entirely. And the numbers suggest he might be onto something.

Weatherbys currently posts a Net Promoter Score of 84. The UK banking average sits around 30. Allan believes that the gap is the highest in UK banking right now, including among private banking peers. As he sees it, it isn't an accident. It's a strategy.

For his work building a modern, resilient technology estate that puts people first, Allan placed third in Digital Edge Magazine's Top 10 CIOs in Banking & Finance. What makes his approach worth studying isn't a single clever platform decision. It's a coherent philosophy, one that runs through every system, every hire, and every conversation about what the bank is actually for.

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A 255-Year Head Start

To understand the bank, you have to understand where it came from. Weatherbys is a seventh-generation, family-owned banking group with more than 255 years of history. Roger Weatherby, the current Chairman, represents the seventh generation of the family in the business.

The origin story is unusual. In the eighteenth century, horse racing was largely the preserve of the landed gentry, and openly chasing unpaid debts between aristocrats was considered impolite. An early member of the Weatherbys family found a tidy solution: he would hold the prize money and race stakes on behalf of participants, then distribute the winnings once the racing was done.

That role of trusted intermediary grew alongside the sport. As racing expanded, so did the need for someone reliable to hold funds, process payments, and keep accurate records. Over time, that quiet administrative function became a bank.

Today, the group spans several distinct businesses. Weatherbys Private Bank serves high-net-worth clients. Weatherbys Racing Bank supports owners, trainers, jockeys and others in the racing industry. Weatherbys Business Bank provides tailored banking services to a growing base of business clients. Arkle Finance handles specialist asset finance, from aircraft and marine assets to commercial lending. Weatherbys Limited continues to perform core industry functions, maintaining the General Stud Book, tracking bloodlines, registering racehorses and producing racecards. "It's quite a unique ecosystem," Allan says. Trust has been the family business for two and a half centuries. The technology simply has to live up to it.

Service First, Segments Never

The core client base comprises high-net-worth individuals, particularly those aged 40 to 60, as well as those over 60. Their expectations are high, and Weatherbys leans into that rather than managing it down.

The relationship model tells you everything. A single relationship manager typically supports no more than around 100 clients. Every client has direct access to a dedicated relationship manager or private banker, as often or as little as they choose.

Allan is firm on one point that separates the bank from much of the industry: clients are people, not categories. "We don't really think in terms of segments. We think in terms of individuals," he says. That plays out in genuinely flexible service. One client may prefer to handle everything themselves through online banking and digital forms. Another may simply call the bank and ask them to pay their bills for the month. Both are entirely acceptable. The job is to deliver excellent service in whatever form the client prefers.

The contrast with mainstream banking is sharp. Picture a business owner who needs support, but has nothing but a chatbot and no way to reach a human. It's an all-too-familiar frustration. At Weatherbys, the answer is straightforward. If you have a problem, you speak to a person. If you need advice, you speak to a person.

The Philosophy: 100% Digital. 100% Human.

Here's the part that makes Allan a genuinely interesting technology leader rather than a nostalgic holdout. He isn't anti-technology. He's pursuing aggressive digital adoption and serious AI implementation, just like his peers. The difference is what comes alongside it.

"Most organisations are pursuing maximum digital adoption and maximum AI implementation. So are we," he explains. "The difference is that we are also staying 100% human." He distils it into a single line: 100% digital. 100% human.

Artificial intelligence should make colleagues faster, better informed and more productive. Digital tools should raise service quality. But neither should ever stand between a client and a person. No client at Weatherbys will be forced to interact with an AI agent or chatbot as their primary point of contact. "Technology should improve relationships, not replace them," he says. It's a useful reframe for any CIO. Automation is treated as a means of freeing up human attention for the moments that matter, not a mechanism for removing humans from the equation altogether.

Start With the Outcome,Not the System

Modernisation programmes are often discussed in terms of platforms and infrastructure. Allan's view is that framing gets things backwards. "With the pace of technological advancement today, there is a danger that the tail starts wagging the dog, that technology starts driving the business rather than serving the business," he says. "We try very hard not to do that." When it comes to transformation and change, Weatherbys always starts with the business need. What are we trying to achieve? What experience do we want clients or colleagues to have? Only once those questions are answered does the conversation turn to selecting technology. "If you start with technology, you're forcing a system on people," Allan explains. "If you start with outcomes, you're selecting technology to support people. That's a very different conversation." The effect on adoption is significant. When people understand the purpose behind a change, alignment becomes considerably easier. When they don't, even the best-chosen platform can struggle to land.

The Weatherbys Way

Every organisation has a culture. At Weatherbys, it goes by a specific name: The Weatherbys Way. Allan describes it as something genuinely difficult to pin down in a single definition, but easy to feel in practice. A large part of it comes from scale. With a team of between 450 and 500 people across offices in Wellingborough, London, Manchester and Edinburgh, Allan knows every person in the organisation by name. "If I need something done, I don't have to contact a department I've never met, in a building I've never visited, managed by people I've never spoken to. I can simply go and talk to them," he says. "That's an enormous advantage." Speed of decision-making is one result. Absence of hiding is another. "At Weatherbys, accountability sits with individuals. Every major decision has an accountable owner, a named individual responsible for it. People don't hide behind committees. People don't hide behind process. People take ownership." That stands in sharp contrast to the experience of many large organisations, where decisions sit inside governance processes, and nobody is quite sure who is responsible for anything. Allan has worked in those environments before. He has no interest in recreating them.

Growing Without LosingWhat Matters

Weatherbys is growing, and growing ambitiously. The plan is to roughly double the size of the business over the next five years.

For Allan, the challenge isn't growth itself. It's preserving everything that makes the bank what it is as the headcount and client base expand. "How do we maintain the same level of service? How do we preserve the same culture? How do we maintain the same accountability? How do we avoid becoming another organisation where the computer says no?" he asks. "Those are the questions we spend time thinking about." The private bank currently serves around 5,000 clients. The racing bank has close to 10,000 account holders. Business banking is newer and still growing. Keeping the personal, accountable, high-touch culture intact at twice the current scale will be one of the defining challenges of the next chapter.

No Legacy, No Excuses

The most striking operational claim Allan makes is also one of the hardest to substantiate in most banks. He says Weatherbys has effectively removed legacy technology from the organisation.

His method is discipline, not luck. For the past five years, the group has held to a deliberate standard: nothing operates below vendor-supported levels. Every platform, every application, every service is either current or N-minus-one, at most one version behind the latest release. "As I sit here today, everything within our estate is maintained to that standard," he says. Scale helps. Weatherbys isn't a large bank, so it avoids the sprawling complexity that traps bigger institutions. But systems age quickly anywhere, and the standard is enforced rather than assumed.

Allan also draws a distinction that many technology leaders blur. Capability and legacy are not the same thing. "A platform can be fully supported and modern, yet still no longer be the best solution for the future," he notes. That's precisely why the bank is now investing in a completely new digital front end. The existing platform isn't outdated. It's simply time for something better. The lesson for technology leaders is clear: eliminating legacy isn't a one-time cleanup. It's a standard you defend continuously, paired with the willingness to replace systems that still work but no longer serve the strategy.

The Right Partnerships forthe Architecture

Building that better front-end required choosing the right partner. Allan's view on technology partnerships is characteristically direct: if you ever find yourself in a conversation that's primarily about the contract, the relationship has already broken down. "The relationship should be about outcomes. It should be about collaboration. It should be about solving problems together. The contractual relationship is simply the framework around that," he says.

For the new digital front end, Weatherbys chose Backbase, the platform that will underpin the new mobile experience, online banking and the broader digital client journey. What convinced Allan wasn't just the platform quality. It was the ecosystem around it. "Regulations change constantly. Customer expectations change constantly. Technology changes constantly. Backbase has built an ecosystem that allows us to respond quickly. It gives us agility without compromising stability. That's incredibly valuable," he explains.

At the core of the bank sits a very different kind of technology. Weatherbys has worked with Oracle since 2015. Its core banking platform, Oracle Flexcube, is the engine at the centre of the business, and Allan wants to keep it that way. "I want my core banking platform to be stable. I don't want constant disruption. I don't want constant change. I want resilience. I want security. I want reliability. Oracle delivers that." The resulting architecture has a clear logic. Backbase provides agility at the front end. Oracle provides stability at the core. Together, they give the bank what it needs on both fronts: a client experience that can evolve quickly, and an operational engine that doesn't.

Data, AI and the Golden Record

Few conversations in financial services move as fast as the one around data and artificial intelligence. Allan has watched the terminology shift for decades, from data warehouses and Big Data, to Single Customer View, to today's language of Golden Records, and he's clear-eyed about what has and hasn't changed. "The underlying challenge hasn't changed. Every organisation is trying to improve its data, whether that data is structured or unstructured, held centrally or across multiple systems," he says. "The difference today is that modern AI tools can work with unstructured data far more effectively than previous generations of technology. That changes the conversation significantly." But in a regulated financial institution, that capability comes with an obligation to govern it carefully. "AI inside a regulated financial institution can be incredibly powerful. It can also be incredibly dangerous if implemented poorly," Allan says. "You cannot simply give an AI model unrestricted access to sensitive information and hope for the best." Weatherbys has taken a deliberate approach: only approved AI tools; only platforms that meet the bank's security requirements; no solutions that export sensitive data outside approved jurisdictions; and, wherever possible, intelligence operating within the bank's own environment. Governance, Allan argues, matters just as much as capability.

Productivity AI vs. Agentic AI

Allan draws a clear line between two categories of AI that are often spoken about as if they were interchangeable.

Productivity AI, covering meeting transcription, CRM note creation, email assistance, and administrative automation, helps people work faster and more efficiently. It's valuable, but it remains fundamentally human-directed. People are still making the calls.

Agentic AI is a different matter. Here, systems begin to recommend actions, potentially make decisions, and potentially act on information. That shift in responsibility demands a different level of scrutiny, and it places data quality at the centre of everything.

The distinction is not academic. Deploy a productivity tool badly, and you might get a poorly worded email summary. Deploy an agentic system on poor data, and the consequences can be significantly more serious.

Why Human JudgementStill Matters

For all the capabilities that modern AI offers, Allan is emphatic that people remain essential, not as a sentimental position, but as a practical one.

He illustrates the point with a simple example. On a recent trip near the Isle of Skye over Easter, he asked a well-known AI assistant for high- and low-tide times so he could take the dog for a walk on the beach. The assistant answered confidently. The only problem: it returned tide times from the previous year. The prompt hadn't been specific enough, and the model had surfaced information that matched the query without flagging that it was out of date. Technically, it wasn't wrong. It just wasn't useful. "That's why validation still matters. That's why judgment still matters. And that's why people still matter," Allan says. The way you ask a question determines the answer you receive. If instructions are poor, outputs will be poor, and that's before anyone asks whether the underlying data is correct in the first place.

Allan also draws a line that he thinks gets lost in the broader debate about AI and employment. "I think people sometimes confuse learning with thinking. AI can learn. AI can identify patterns. AI can generate responses. But human judgment remains incredibly important." His position on whether AI will replace jobs is equally clear. AI will help people. It will augment people. It will improve productivity. It will remove repetitive work and allow people to focus on higher-value activities. But it will not replace human thinking, and he has no intention of letting it try. "My objective remains exactly the same as it was at the start of this conversation: 100% digital. 100% human. AI supports that vision. It doesn't replace it."

Fresh Thinking: TheUniversity Partnership

Strategy and infrastructure matter. But Allan is equally focused on something less visible on a technology roadmap: the people building and running the systems.

Now 50, Allan is candid about why that focus matters personally as much as professionally. "I'm realistic enough to know that I'm not going to learn every new technique, trend or technology on my own. Fresh thinking matters. Fresh perspectives matter." That conviction led to a partnership with Edinburgh Napier University that has become one of the more quietly distinctive aspects of Weatherbys' approach to developing its technology capability. Scottish universities typically run four-year degree programmes, with the third year spent on placement. Weatherbys brings those students in as full-time employees for the duration, working within the technology and cybersecurity teams and gaining real-world experience in a regulated banking environment.

The returns flow in both directions. Students gain genuine exposure to the pressures and standards of financial services technology. And Weatherbys gains something it can't generate internally: fresh thinking from people who haven't yet absorbed years of institutional habit.

Allan frames this dynamic through what he calls the cucumber theory. "When somebody joins an organisation, they're a cucumber. They're fresh. They haven't been influenced by years of internal processes. They haven't become conditioned by how things have always been done. They bring new ideas. They challenge assumptions. They see opportunities." Those who have been inside the organisation for years? "We're gherkins. We've been sitting in the jar for a while. We've absorbed the environment." Both have their value, he adds quickly. But without a steady supply of cucumbers, organisations risk going stale.

The placement students also arrive connected to wider networks, student engineering groups, technology societies, research projects and innovation initiatives, and that network effect amplifies the value they bring. They don't just carry their own ideas. They carry ideas from communities of people actively exploring what's next.

What began almost accidentally, when a student approached the bank looking for a placement, and Allan said yes, has become a formal, highly effective talent pipeline. Most students return for part-time work during their final year. Upon graduating, many join Weatherbys permanently. At present, the conversion rate is 100 per cent. In a growing organisation with natural turnover through retirement and career progression, that pipeline is worth considerably more than its headline numbers suggest.

Three Pillars for WhatComes Next

Looking ahead, Allan organises his technology strategy around three pillars, a framework that connects immediate operational discipline to longer-term ambition.

The first is what he calls Maintain Safe. It's unglamorous but non-negotiable. "Technology is like a plant. If you buy a plant and leave it in the corner without watering it, it eventually dies. Technology is exactly the same. You have to maintain it. You have to patch it. You have to update it. You have to keep it healthy." The commitment to N-minus-one isn't just a historical achievement. It's an ongoing standard that has to be actively defended.

The second pillar is Become Efficient, using AI, automation, productivity tools, and workflow improvements to help people perform their jobs more effectively. Not just faster. Better. The goal is to enable colleagues to focus on higher-value activities while technology handles repetitive, routine tasks.

The third pillar, Become Augmented Digital, is where the bank's broader philosophy finds its fullest expression. This is where data, AI and innovation converge, not to replace people, but to enhance them. To support better decision-making. To improve service. To improve outcomes for clients. And to help the bank continue evolving without losing sight of what made it worth trusting in the first place.

The Threats That KeepAllan Awake

Ask Allan what concerns him most, and the answer comes without hesitation: frontier AI. Not because of the opportunities it offers, he's clear-eyed about those, but because of the risks it creates for the organisations trying to stay secure against it. "As these models become increasingly sophisticated, they become exceptionally good at identifying vulnerabilities," he explains. "That's fantastic if you're defending systems. It's potentially problematic if you're attacking them." The same technologies that help security teams identify weaknesses are equally available to those looking to exploit them. The window between vulnerability discovery and exploitation is shrinking rapidly. The response has to get faster to match.

Beyond frontier AI sits a longer-horizon concern: quantum computing. Most organisations still rely on encryption standards designed for traditional computing environments. As computing power increases, certain encryption methods become more vulnerable. The major vendors, including Microsoft, Oracle and others, are already working on post-quantum cryptography solutions. But Allan's responsibility is to ensure those protections ultimately make their way into Weatherbys' own environment, and to stay close enough to the frontier to know when the timeline for action shifts.

What Technology LeadershipIs Actually For

Strip away the architecture decisions, the partnership choices, the talent programmes and the strategic frameworks, and Allan's view of what the job is actually about becomes clear. "Technology leadership isn't really about technology," he says. "It's about people. It's about helping people do their jobs better. It's about creating trust. It's about creating capability. And it's about creating environments where people can succeed. The technology itself is only ever part of the story. The people remain the most important part." That philosophy, held consistently across every domain, including service design, technology governance, organisational culture, AI strategy and talent development, is ultimately what the NPS of 84 reflects. The bank invests heavily in digital tools not to engineer humans out of the relationship, but to give its people more time and space to be human. Modern infrastructure isn't a vanity project. It's the foundation that makes both world-class service and world-class hiring possible. And The Weatherbys Way, the accountability, the speed, the personal knowledge of every colleague, is the intangible that no platform can replicate.

In an industry racing toward automation, Allan's argument is quiet but consistent. The future isn't people versus AI. It's people working alongside AI. And the organisations that understand that distinction earliest, the ones that use technology to strengthen relationships rather than replace them, are the ones most likely to still be trusted two and a half centuries from now. Weatherbys has been proving that point since the eighteenth century. Allan is simply making sure the technology keeps up.