GFT Names New UK CEO to Balance AI Innovation and Bank Risk

Digital transformation consultancy GFT Technologies has hired NTT DATA's Banking and Financial Markets Chief, Andrew Nelson, naming him as its new UK CEO.

Having worked in the tech industry for 25 years, Andrew is joining GFT during a critical inflection point for the financial services sector, where tier-1 banks are facing tightening compliance mandates, shifting regulation frameworks and pressure to scale Gen AI. 

Andrew plans to weaponise GFT’s heavy engineering pool to de-risk complex IT infrastructure modernisation.

The appointment lands just as GFT is named a Leader in cloud-native core banking transformation by IDC MarketScape.

Unlocking legacy data to move AI past the PoC stage 

Andrew’s transition from NTT DATA is a significant talent acquisition for GFT. In his previous role, he managed complex, multi-year digital transformation roadmaps for major global financial networks. 

His background at both NTT DATA and CGI is rooted in heavy lifting IT, including migrating fragile, mainframe-dependent environments to modern, decoupled cloud architectures.

This specific expertise bridges a major gap in tech, where many financial enterprises are currently stuck in the stage of proof-of-concept (PoC) AI because their underlying data pipelines are trapped in legacy siloes. 

Andrew’s work experience suggests GFT will lean heavily into fixing the underlying data fabric of its clients, ensuring that enterprise AI initiatives are built on clean, scalable foundations rather than superficial layers.

The key technical priorities for GFT customers

For CTOs, CIOs and enterprise architects partnering with GFT, Andrew’s leadership points to three immediate focal points in the firm’s service delivery:

1. Production-grade gen AI engineering: Moving away from standalone chatbots toward deeply integrated, agentic workflows by building gen AI capabilities directly into core middle-office and backend workflows while maintaining rigid data governance.
2. Decoupling the monolith securely: Making use of Andrew’s experience with incumbent banking architectures to execute core platform renewals without breaking operational continuity or compromising strict resilience metrics.
3. Regulated multi-cloud acceleration: Building out cloud-native blueprints that specifically answer to stringent UK compliance demands, including the FCA’s operational resilience rules and evolving European DORA-aligned frameworks.

Striking the technical balance of innovation vs. operational risk

The core challenge for modern B2B tech deployments in banking is executing innovation without introducing systemic vulnerabilities. 

Andrew is quick to point out this tension. “Financial services in the UK are under pressure to adopt AI," he says.

"Without it, they’ll struggle to remain globally competitive. The challenge lies in ensuring resilience, security and regulatory compliance while transforming their business. 

“GFT is well-recognised for combining deep-sector expertise with strong engineering and platform capabilities. I am looking forward to leading the UK team as we strike the right balance between innovation and risk."

GFT’s Global CEO Marco Santos emphasised that Andrew’s engineering credibility is exactly what enterprise clients need to successfully move past theoretical tech adoption. 

“His understanding of the challenges facing banks today, coupled with his track record of delivering large-scale transformation, makes him uniquely positioned to help our clients unlock the full potential of AI and modern engineering,” he says.

By placing a heavy-hitter from NTT DATA at the top of its UK operations, GFT is telling the market that it is prioritising hard engineering as well as high-level business consulting. 

For enterprise IT leaders, it means a stronger emphasis on robust data pipelines, cloud-native modernisation, and making sure that AI strategies can actually scale securely inside heavily regulated environments.