GFT Hires New UK CEO to Drive AI Growth and Manage Risk

GFT Technologies has named Andy Nelson, previously Banking and Financial Markets Chief at NTT DATA, as its new UK CEO.

His appointment comes at a pivotal time for the financial services industry, as major banks navigate tightening compliance obligations, shifting regulatory expectations and mounting pressure to operationalise gen AI at scale.

Andrew, who brings 25 years of experience in the technology sector, is stepping into the role with a clear view of the balancing act required.

“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."

Central to his strategy is leveraging GFT’s engineering strength to reduce the risk associated with large-scale IT modernisation. His arrival also coincides with GFT being recognised as a leader in cloud-native core banking transformation by IDC MarketScape.

GFT’s Global CEO Marco Santos underscored the importance of Andrew’s engineering-led perspective.

“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 bringing in a senior executive from NTT DATA, GFT is signalling a clear intent to double down on deep engineering expertise alongside its consulting capabilities.

For enterprise IT stakeholders, this translates into a sharper focus on modern data infrastructure, cloud-native transformation and ensuring AI initiatives can scale securely within highly regulated banking environments.

Releasing AI stuck in the Proof-of-Concept stage

Andrew’s move represents a significant addition to GFT’s leadership, following his work delivering complex, multi-year transformation programmes for global financial institutions at NTT DATA.

Across both NTT DATA and CGI, his experience has focused on large-scale IT transformation, including migrating legacy, mainframe-dependent systems into decoupled cloud environments.

That background directly addresses a key industry challenge: many banks remain stuck in AI proof-of-concept phases due to fragmented data and legacy infrastructure constraints.

With Andrew at the helm, GFT is expected to prioritise fixing underlying data architectures, enabling clients to build scalable AI capabilities on robust, production-ready foundations.

A roadmap to customer success

For technology leaders working with GFT, Andrew’s leadership signals three immediate areas of focus:

• Production-grade gen AI engineering: Transitioning from isolated chatbot deployments to fully integrated, agent-driven workflows embedded across middle-office and backend systems, with strict governance controls

• Decoupling the monolith securely: Modernising core banking platforms while preserving operational continuity and meeting stringent resilience requirements

• Regulated multi-cloud acceleration: Designing cloud-native solutions tailored to UK regulatory frameworks, including FCA operational resilience standards and evolving DORA-aligned requirements in Europe

For banks, the core challenge remains introducing innovation without increasing systemic risk exposure.