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Women Count 2018 found that in the last three years there has been no progress on gender diversity in senior roles in the FTSE 350 – and by some measures, it is going backwards.

Women Count is the third annual report by The Pipeline, that tracks and analyses the number of women on Executive Committees of FTSE 350 companies. The report found that:

• The ratio of women on Executive Committees of FTSE 350 companies has stayed the same at only 16% since the first report three years ago.
• 95% of all P&L roles on Executive Committees are held by men and just 5% by women, a decrease on last year – most women instead perform ‘functional’ roles such as HR, marketing, legal or compliance.
• The percentage of women executives on main boards has flatlined at 8% between 2017 and 2018. This means 92% are still held by men.

Representation on Executive Committees, unlike representation on Boards, is the best measure of gender equality in the FTSE 350 because executives have power in the running of a company.

Banks continue to have much to do if they really want to improve their gender pay gap, increase women in senior roles and better reflect their customer base. With 25% representation of women on their Executive Committees, this means that men make up 75% of operating committees. Even worse on the main Board, there is 83% representation of men across Executive Director roles. Increasing the number of women in senior…

Stephan Schmidt-Tank, Senior Manager, Financial Services Business & Market Development at Amazon Web Services 

1. Is helping clients with core banking software something that AWS has looked at, or would consider looking at?

We’re seeing a wave of change sweeping the industry directly related to financial institutions’ move to the cloud, and core systems are no exception.  Our customers – both financial institutions and providers of financial solutions – are using AWS services to both transform legacy core systems by migrating them to the cloud, and to innovate in this space by bringing new cloud-native core systems to market.

For example, Monzo, a U.K. based bank that is currently live with limited-edition debit cards, uses the AWS Cloud to host its core banking application to leverage scale and flexibility of cloud computing as well as eliminate the guessing game around capacity, provisioning, and infrastructure management.

Another great example includes our work with Starling Bank, the UK mobile-only challenger bank designed and built completely on the AWS Cloud. The bank uses AWS to deliver and scale infrastructure on demand while ensuring proper governance by managing developer privileges for releases on AWS via automation with Slack. Starling Bank also engaged directly, and early on, with UK and EU banking regulators on its use of AWS to build and operate all of its infrastructure, including its core banking. It was able to demonstrate to these bodies that it could effectively meet its security and compliance obligations.

Mambu,…