Standard Bank head of IT engineering resigns following technical outages

Alpheus Mangale

An ITweb report reveals what Standard Bank said in its statement:

“The group’s chief engineering officer, Alpheus Mangale, as the senior executive accountable for the stability of our IT systems, has resigned from the group with immediate effect. The engineering team will now report to Margaret Nienaber, the group’s chief executive for client solutions, adding to her current portfolio. Margaret Nienaber has wide and deep executive experience in all aspects of financial services.

“Our priority has been to stabilise our systems, ensure services to our clients are fully restored, investigate and remove the causes of these outages, and demonstrate to our clients and colleagues that we are moving quickly and decisively to rebuild confidence in our systems.”

Standard Bank suffered a major outage on 21 May due to a generic switch failure, according to ITweb's report. At the time Standard Bank SA CEO, Lungisa Fuzile, hosted an urgent media briefing to render an apology.

According to the bank's website, Mangale joined the group in September 2017 as group chief information officer. Prior to this, he held several senior executive leadership roles at MTN South Africa, Cisco Systems South Africa and Dimension Data Middle East and Africa. In line with changes to the group’s operating model, the role changed to chief engineering officer with effect from 1 January 2021.