Finance industry watchdog wants new CIO

Australia's banking, insurance and superannuation industry watchdog is on the lookout for a new head of IT to spearhead its technology strategy.

The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) will take applications from interested candidates until 6 March 2015, according to a job ad.

It is looking for experienced professionals - ideally with some experience working with accounting software - to put their names forward for the role.

The agency has also foreshadowed that the new technology boss will be expected to review “the performance of all operating systems within the IT branch to make sure that optimal usage of resources occurs in order to maintain consistency with the business objectives of APRA”.

APRA’s last named chief information officer was Leslie Howatt, who joined the organisation in August 2013 following a stint with ANZ Bank' IT shop. Howatt had also previously served as CIO at EnergyAustralia.

APRA has played an influential, if at times controversial, role in the Australian finance IT sector in the past. It initially took a risk-averse stance towards cloud computing and asked that regulated entities consult with it before taking up cloud options.

But the agency has more recently adopted a case-by-case approach to assessing risk, which has seen some major cloud deployments proceed in the sector.

Internally, over the last 12 months APRA completed the implementation of a new market supervision platform which it says will push through a greater volume of its probability and impact rating system (PAIRS) assessments, resulting in better early identification of industry threats.

The agency's focus is now on new, secure collaboration tools that will allow its staff to share compliance information at a faster pace.