Barclays' digital product specialist in New York is leaving

When you're an investment bank, some of the hardest people to keep hold of aren't top traders or M&A bankers, but 'digital transformation' specialists. They have a habit of disappearing.

Accordingly, a member of Barclays' New York-based digital product and digital strategy team, Ying Cao, is leaving. 

Cao has been with Barclays for 10 years and was a member of the market clients strategy team between 2015 and 2017. She's understood to be leaving to set up her own coaching company.

When digital evangelists leave investment banks, it's usually because evangelizing has become too onerous. Banks are bureaucratic behemoths and for all the talk, digital transformation doesn't come easy.  

Cao is the latest in a series of digital types to leave banks. Greg Lee, a former managing director in digital strategy at Barclays' investment bank left in 2019 and became a managing director at Paxos, where he says he's "innovating the plumbing of securities settlement." 

There have also been exits from Barclays' electronic trading business, including Nej D’jelal, head of electronic equities and quant prime services, in London, and Daniel Nehren, a managing director and head of of statistical modelling and development at Barclays' New York office. Graham Wayne, Barclays' former EMEA electronic equities product head, also left last year. 

Cao is the first digital transformation professional we're aware of who's going into coaching. It's understood that she's founding a digital coaching platform that will involve both high and low touch coaching services. Chuck Teixeira, the former head of transformation for HSBC's markets business also left to go out on his own four years ago, and founded WCKD RZR, a provider of intelligent automated data privacy solutions.

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