- Tony Kerrison, BofA’s CTO, will now report directly to Cathy Bessant, the bank’s top tech exec.
- Kerrison, who leads the bank’s tech infrastructure, has also expanded his duties.
- The promotion underscores the bank’s commitment to cloud technology.
- See more stories on Insider’s business page.
Tony Kerrison now has a seat at the table. Cathy Bessant’s leadership table, that is.
Kerrison, who is Bank of America’s chief technology officer and leader of its Technology and Infrastructure Services (TIS), has been given a bigger remit and will now report directly to Bessant, who is BofA’s top tech executive, Insider has learned.
Kerrison, whose focus includes how the bank’s technology is architected across the firm, was elevated to Bessant’s leadership table last week. The group consists of nine tech executives, including Kerrison, that sit across the bank and its eight business lines and report directly to Bessant, Bank of America’s chief operations and technology officer.
The move is a nod towards the increasing focus big banks are putting on how their tech is organized and the adoption of cloud technology.
“Tony’s elevation to my leadership table is recognition of how integral infrastructure is to the client experience,” Bessant told Insider via email.
Kerrison’s role has also expanded to lead core technology infrastructure. His new duties include application production support for consumer, small business, wealth management and global banking and markets.
Kerrison already leads the TIS organization, which oversees the entire bank’s technology infrastructure needs across business lines and regions. The team is responsible for technology and operations related to internal servers, data centers, cloud strategy, networks, and application services. Automation, server patching, end-to-end engineering, and incident management also fall under his umbrella.
Prior to his promotion, Kerrison reported to David Reilly, the chief information officer of global banking and markets who is also a member of Bessant’s leadership table.
Bank of America has stayed busy with cloud initiatives
No stranger to how big banks structure their technology, Kerrison has held several c-level tech jobs across the Street.
He previously served as chief technology officer of Bank of America’s global wholesale banking business, before departing for Barclays in 2015 to serve as its head of global technology infrastructure services. Kerrison also held CTO roles at ING and Merrill Lynch.
Kerrison returned to Bank of America in 2018, and was named chief technology officer in March 2020, filling the role left open by Howard Boville’s departure to IBM.
Bank of America, for its part, has been vocal about its cloud journey. Unlike others on Wall Street, the bank initially resisted the urge to lean on the public cloud, instead choosing to build out its own private cloud. The seven-year project allowed the bank to save $2.1 billion in infrastructure costs, Insider reported in June 2019.
However, the bank hasn’t completely ignored the trend. Bank of America announced in late 2019 it was collaborating with IBM on its finance-specific hybrid cloud.
The bank has no intentions of slowing its adoption of new tech in the space, either. Speaking at Bank of America’s summit on digital banking earlier this month, both Bessant and Reilly mentioned the importance of 5G tech.
Reilly cited 5G playing a key role in the adoption of edge computing, whereby data is analyzed more quickly by doing it closer to its point of collection.
“We have an internal platform, but the general trend in the industry to adopt third-party clouds, coupled with 5G, has meant there is now much more computing being done on the edge of the network,” Reilly said. “What used to be a network device very close to the client is now a network device, a firewall device, a security device, a storage device and a server computer.”
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