UBS Digital Chief Exits

The bank is losing its chief digital officer after less than one year. She is leaving for a trading services provider to the financial industry.

Elly Hardwick is leaving the Swiss-based bank and taking a board role at Itiviti, a finance-specialized technology and service provider. Hardwick was a linchpin in UBS’ $2 billion annual technology plan, led by chief information officer Mike Dargan.

A spokeswoman for UBS said Dargan will take over Hardwick’s role.

The move is a coup for Itiviti, a 33-year-old Stockholm backed company that helps banks digitize and automate their trading platforms. Hardwick is one of the few prominent women in financial technology and banking: she was Deutsche Bank’s head of innovation for two years before joining UBS.

Her exit at UBS comes one year after Dargan divvied up a key tech role Hardwick and Rick Carey in what was viewed as shifting from a traditionally free-wheeling innovation and technology discovery towards projects with a tangible benefit for the bank.

The financial services industry is seeing a significant increase both in opportunities for digitization and in demand for digitized services, Hardwick said in a statement by Itiviti, which is owned by private equity firm Nordic Capital.

She is also a board member at Axis Capital and at Alpha Bank and previously worked for Booz Allen & Hamilton, Thomson Reuters (now Refinitiv), and was founding CEO of Credit Benchmark.