Peter Serenita, a pioneer of the CDO role and a popular speaker at A-Team Group’s Data Management Insight Summits, has retired after a distinguished career spanning more than 20 years in capital markets data management.
In a LinkedIn post early this week, Serenita wrote: “Well, the time has come. I have officially retired. I have had the privilege to work for three great companies: J.P. Morgan, HSBC and Scotiabank and with a ton of amazing people (too many to name). I remember back when the number of data people could be counted on one hand and the birth of the title ‘Chief Data Officer’. I am so proud of the fact that we can use the term ‘Data Professional’ because it has rightfully risen in importance and become a true profession. I am thrilled to see all of the new people that have made data their career choice. I wish all of them well and challenge them to ‘take data to the next level’.”
Serenita started his capital markets journey at J.P. Morgan, where he held the positions of technology head of corporate risk; chief architect, finance and corporate risk; and global reference data services, head of technology and operations. At J.P. MorganChase he took the role of CDO, worldwide securities services and global head of pricing operations.
In July 2009, Serenita joined HSBC as global head of data management, global banking and markets client onboarding and account maintenance. His role later expanded to CDO, global banking and markets, before he became HSBC group CDO in March 2013. In this role, Serenita, created HSBC’s first global data organisation, established data and analytics as a board level priority for the bank, and defined HSBC data strategy and the execution of the strategy to bring business value.
Moving to Scotiabank in August 2017, Serenita was initially the bank’s US CDO and in 2019 became CDO. In this role, he pivoted the enterprise data office from a policy and process focus to a delivery focus, restructured the organisation to be federated and aligned to business priorities across the enterprise, and shifted the focus of the team to align with the analytics teams and deliver managed quality data for business revenue growth and improved customer experience. He also defined a hybrid architecture that leveraged the strengths of on premise and cloud environments, modified the data management process to stress time-to-market and iterative delivery, and implemented AI and ML tools to automate the data discovery and data management processes for advanced analytics.
Serenita has also made a huge contribution to the capital markets sector at large. He served as a board member and later as chairman of the board of the EDM Council for 15 years, and spent towards three years as a member of the data work stream of the Financial Research Advisory Committee, an organisation set up by the US Office of Financial Research.
Along with many other data management professionals and capital markets participants, A-Team Group would like to wish Peter Serenita a very happy retirement.
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