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Her core remit includes shaping a people strategy that supports the Bank’s growth, resilience and innovation agenda, with a particular focus on leadership strength, capability deployment and organisational effectiveness across Technology and Operations.
Standard Chartered has welcomed Seetal Bhatti as Global Head of HR for Technology and Operations, effective January 2026. She reports to the Bank’s senior leadership and is based in Singapore.
Seetal brings with her extensive international HR leadership experience across senior generalist and Centre of Excellence roles. Her career spans tenure at organisations including Centrica, SABMiller, AB InBev, and most recently BT Group, where she led people strategy and large-scale transformation across complex global environments. She has a proven record of aligning people and business priorities through periods of growth, business model change, turnaround and mergers and acquisitions.
At Standard Chartered, Seetal’s core remit includes shaping a people strategy that supports the Bank’s growth, resilience and innovation agenda, with a particular focus on leadership strength, capability deployment and organisational effectiveness across Technology and Operations.
Speaking to HRO, Seetal says her immediate priority is to listen to colleagues and build a commercially aligned people strategy that strengthens leadership depth, skills deployment and organisational effectiveness in Technology and Operations. Over the longer term, she aims to redesign work and workforce models to responsibly scale AI-enabled capability in support of sustainable business growth.
She also highlights the importance of focusing HR strategy on human-AI collaboration and skills-based thinking – embedding these into workforce planning, productivity and work design.
"Beyond this, I believe that leading at the intersection of the people and technology agenda gives me an unique vantage point to influence how we think about scaling human and technological capabilities together for sustainable growth and I aim to bring technologists, HR practitioners and leaders together to advance the agenda, improving our colleague experience and productivity as we do so," she adds.
Anticipating the challenges ahead, Seetal notes that redesigning work for the AI era requires navigating through noise with creativity, courage and prioritisation. "I see the leadership challenge within this to be the ability to identify the few strategic shifts that will genuinely enhance our ability to deliver on our ambitions, and then to align operating models, capability, culture and investment behind them in a responsive and disciplined way."
The path to this, she tells us, requires comes from education of leaders and teams, investing time to building a shared understanding of the opportunities and constraints and setting common goals and then creating space for experimentation as well as focused application supported by a learning culture.
Within her HR team, Seetal aims to foster a culture grounded in three principles: making a difference; doing what’s right over what’s easy, and winning together – what she calls a "winning recipe that supports the individual and organisation to thrive together."
"It happens to fit very well with our purpose-driven culture and valued behaviours here at the Bank and I am really encouraged by what I have experienced so far."
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Photo / Seetal Bhatti's LinkedIn
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