Gboyega Dada, chief digital and information officer at Standard Bank Corporate and Investment Banking (CIB), has built a career at the nexus of curiosity and structure, drawn to the hidden systems that keep institutions moving.
Gboyega Dada did not set out to build a career in technology. He began on the business side at Citibank in Nigeria, then joined a core banking reimplementation project to represent business needs and has never looked back. He credits seeing up close how technology could shape the business as what kept him in IT. “I enjoyed how technology added value to the business of banking and how it significantly contributed to driving the growth of the business,” he says.
Growing up in Nigeria with parents who were academics, Gboyega’s interest in technology had early roots. His father was a university professor while his mother was a schoolteacher, so he describes his childhood as shaped by reading, curiosity and a tendency to tinker with – and break – whatever tech he could get his hands on.
Today, as chief digital and information officer of Standard Bank CIB, Gboyega is dealing with the central tension of keeping a large, trusted bank stable, while also pushing it to evolve.
Standard Bank’s longevity and scale are part of its strength, he says, but success over more than 160 years also comes with legacy systems and inherited complexity. It’s a delicate balancing act keeping reliability and reinvention both in play.
“We are the leading CIB business on the continent and that means we must run a stable technology infrastructure and platform to enable our clients to transact their business and have trust in us, but at the same time, we must be at the forefront of innovation,” he says.
At the coalface
That balancing act absorbs a significant share of the bank’s attention. Stability can’t slip, and innovation can’t be treated as an ornament. Gboyega says the business continues to invest in people and systems at the leading edge, then work to integrate that progress back into the core.
His reflections on leadership are direct. Looking back on one of the toughest periods of his career, he recalls trying to transform a bank’s technology without the financial investment he needed. In that season, he says the people who were around him were what mattered most. “It’s not the technology stack that makes the difference, it’s actually the people, the culture. If you can rally the people around a clear outcome, they make things happen.”
These sentiments extend to how he thinks about talent within Standard Bank CIB. Compensation is part of the equation, and he is direct about it: “We pay well.” But the environment matters just as much. His view is that the bank’s role is to give technologists meaningful problems to solve, clear business outcomes to work towards and sufficient context to understand why regulation and governance are realities to be navigated rather than obstacles to be avoided.
He is similarly clear that innovation should not live in a silo. In a DevOps environment, he says, it needs to happen “at the coalface”, where teams are building, running and securing the systems they own, even if there is also a central function helping drive innovation as a discipline and culture.
His take on the future of banking is that it may become increasingly invisible. Gboyega’s bet is not simply on AI or quantum computing, though he acknowledges those technologies will matter. It is on a deeper shift in how banks show up in clients’ lives. “We’ll get to a stage where we will be more of a shop of very sophisticated and complex APIs that plug straight into our clients’ ERP systems, into their supply chain,” he says. In that vision, the bank becomes less of a place clients visit than an engine embedded in how they operate.
For now, he sees AI and automation delivering value in more immediate ways: augmenting bankers with sharper client and sector intelligence, improving back-office consistency and speed, and supporting better decision-making in areas such as credit and risk. He also points to cybersecurity as a permanent pressure point, particularly when it comes to third-party exposure and the increasingly sophisticated use of AI by bad actors.
Shifting scenes
Away from the formality of banking, Gboyega’s interests are less predictable. He describes himself as having a playful side that may not always be obvious at first glance, and says he unwinds through road cycling, photography and short filmmaking. Of those, street photography seems to hold a particular pull, not least because it lets him bring together people and architecture in constantly shifting scenes.
His reading follows a similarly wide path. Alongside banking and technology, he is drawn to psychology, history and philosophy, and mentions Robert Greene’s The Concise Laws of Human Nature, Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle is the Way and Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus as among the books he returns to.
He speaks about technology with the seriousness you would expect, but what comes through just as strongly is his interest in people: how they work, what drives them, and what makes institutions hold. In Gboyega’s telling, the future will be built in code, but only ever through people.
