When Rumi Contractor was a 16-year old boy studying at a Jesuit boarding college on the west coast of India, he dreamed of being an air force pilot.

Today, he sits high above London looking out over the fog that has engulfed the capital city. But it is not from the cockpit of a jet plane, it is from a meeting room on the 26th floor of HSBC’s Sir Norman Foster tower in Canary Wharf.

Contractor confesses to surprise that he is chief information officer (CIO) for Europe at the world’s third-largest bank, and that he has notched up almost two decades of service with the behemoth.

His father may have persuaded him not to pursue his childhood dream of being a fighter pilot, but Contractor is happy with his accidental corporate role.

He says he still has a reason to roll back the duvet every morning and go to work: ‘I get a great buzz out of resolving issues, having new ideas drummed into my head and talking to people in my team.’

In fact, for a CIO, Contractor takes great pains to emphasise that technology is only a tool and not a solution.

‘Anyone can replicate technology. But you can’t replicate the people,’ he says. ‘The game is not just about technology, it’s about bringing technology and our people together so they can provide the best possible service for our customers.’

Contractor is as international as the bank he works for. He was educated in India, but is a Zoroastrian – followers of an ancient religion that started in Iran but fled to India when the Arabs invaded in the seventh century.

He has lived all over the world – working throughout the Middle East before moving to New York, living in Hong Kong, Brazil and now the UK.

Although he admits that a bank the size of HSBC, with 280,000 employees in 76 countries and territories, serving around 125 million customers worldwide, can have frustratingly high levels of bureaucracy, its global reach does have its advantages.

‘Being big can be a good thing,’ says Contractor. ‘We brand ourselves as the world’s local bank and in IT we actually prove this. We could find a solution to a problem in one part of the world and then re-package it and roll it out across the globe.’

For example, HSBC developed a technology in Mexico to enable its customers to to donate to charity when they withdrew cash from an ATM, and this has now been implemented in the UK.

But the bank is also exploring far more radical ideas. Contractor reveals that within HSBC’s headquarters in Canary Wharf there exists a lab where the bank’s researchers monitor technologies that could help the organisation to improve its business.

Contractor’s vision of the future bears striking resemblance to Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report – virtual reality will be coming to a bank near you. HSBC is trying out a window that acts as an electronic screen as well as a see-through pane of glass.

So, when customers walk by they can see a projection of the bank’s latest marketing campaign on the window. When the new electronic window is up and running, HSBC will be able to download all of its new marketing material throughout the country at the touch of a button.

‘It will be a much easier way of sending our latest marketing campaign to all our branches,’ says Contractor. ‘We don’t have to design a marketing poster, have it printed, perhaps discover changes that need to be made, re-print it then transport it around the country and hope that the branch puts it in the right location on the right day.’

He says the technology would also allow the bank to be much more flexible. ‘For example, we could instantly change the interest rate of a loan to 5.8 per cent from 6.1 per cent.’

Contractor is not just adopting the latest cutting-edge systems for the bank; he also employs psychologists to give a better idea of how we interact with technology.

‘There are certain web sites that, when you visit them, you just like to use, then there are others where you think: “I desperately want this product, but I give up. I just don’t understand this site”. We use psychologists to help us to understand what it is about a web page that catches someone’s attention,’ he says.

Research suggests users hate web sites that involve clicking 15 different times to find the required information. But Contractor says that, while moving their mouse over a web site, users do not become so irritated if different options are displayed that they can continually roll through.

So in fact, while the customer has still made their way through 15 different options, it feels like one continuous action.

For a bank as mind-bogglingly large as HSBC, the roles of technology are equally mind-boggling: they range from ensuring the smooth running of administration systems, to controlling costs, to using new technologies to boost the bank’s sales, through to providing data analysis of complex and competitive markets.

All of these areas fall within Contractor’s remit, and not only has technology progressed dramatically in the past 10 years, but so has the role for head of technology. ‘Management is far savvier about technology,’ he says. ‘In the past, IT was just viewed as a black box, but they now want to have in-depth conversation about what the market and our competitors are doing. IT is no longer treated as a back-office department.’

Management’s increased understanding of technology is mirrored by an increasingly demanding consumer. The information revolution means the customer can now find the best mortgage deal or bank loan by using one of a host of price comparison web sites that do most of the work.

In the past, it would have taken days to call round all the banks to find the best deal – now a good snapshot of the market can be made in minutes. ‘There is no doubt that the customer calls the shots today as opposed to the banks. That trend is not going to change,’ says Contractor.

And he predicts that customers will become ever-more demanding. ‘The customer will want to do things as and when he or she wants, according to their own timetable,’ he says.

‘In five years’ time, the customer will be in complete control, transferring money anywhere at any time with instant access to information about new or existing products, and able to open and close accounts around the globe from one location.’

For his vision to become reality, governments and bank regulators will have to allow this level of automation to occur, he concedes. But even though Contractor believes that technology’s role in banking is only going to increase, he does not believe it is time to sound the death knell for the humble bank branch.

‘When the internet started, people first thought that it was a fad and that it would never become a commercial tool. That has been proved wrong,’ he says.

‘Then there were the pundits and gurus who thought the rise of the internet spelled the end of bank branches: why go into a branch if you have the internet?’

But humans are more complex than that. ‘People like doing certain things in certain ways,’ says Contractor. ‘If it is a commodity product, then people will buy it on the internet. But if it is a specialist item, these are things people want to see for themselves and talk to someone about. So they will buy those items in person.

‘But whenever they log on or do something online, it has to work. The customer should not have to ask: “is my computer secure? Do I need to make a phone call to make sure this transaction has actually happened?” HSBC needs to carry on building trust with its customers.’

The trick for businesses in the face of the technological revolution is to keep listening to their customers and providing what they want. ‘A customer should be able to get exactly the same services from the internet as they can from a bank branch,’ he says.

‘That could mean clicking on an icon on your computer and linking through to someone who talks to you over the PC. The only thing the customer could not do in this way is obtain cash in hand, but in five years’ time, there will be electronic wallets so physical cash will no longer be necessary.’

Now, rather than being an air force pilot, Contractor dreams of using technology to make banking glitch-free for HSBC’s customers – but this is still a lofty ambition that will take time and hard work to achieve. cb