When the Bank Needed a Strategist Who Could Also Build: Placing an EVP Strategy & Digital

"We needed someone who could sit in a board strategy session in the morning and review a digital product roadmap in the afternoon. That person is genuinely rare. AlvaHunt found one."

Country CEO Foreign Bank, Jakarta

The Challenge

A foreign bank operating in Indonesia was accelerating its digital transformation agenda. The regional headquarters had approved a five-year investment program to modernize core banking infrastructure, launch a digital lending product, and build a data-driven customer acquisition capability.

The bank needed an EVP of Strategy and Digital to own the transformation mandate. The role required a leader who could operate at two levels simultaneously. 

At the executive level: 

Designing the strategic roadmap, aligning the board and regional headquarters on investment priorities, and managing relationships with technology partners and regulators. 

At the operational level: 

Driving product development, overseeing technology implementation, and building a team of digital and analytics professionals within an institution with a traditional banking culture.

The Country CEO described the profile as a rare intersection. A pure strategist would design a roadmap but struggle to execute. A pure technologist would build a product but lose the board in the process. The incoming EVP needed both, and needed to be credible in both rooms.

The bank's regional HR team had spent weeks in preliminary conversations. Four candidates had been approached: 

• Two declined after learning the role required navigating a traditional banking culture with a lean transformation budget. 
• One withdrew citing concerns about the pace of decision-making in a large institution. 
• One progressed to final discussions but could not align on compensation.

How AlvaHunt Helped

AlvaHunt's Requirements Deep Dive with the Management team surfaced two critical insights that previous outreach had not addressed.

First, the compensation issue was structural.

The bank's regional compensation framework for EVP roles was calibrated against traditional banking profiles. Digital transformation leaders in Indonesia's market commanded a premium that the framework did not reflect. AlvaHunt conducted a market intelligence exercise before launching the search, presenting benchmark data that informed a revised compensation structure approved by the regional headquarters before any candidate was approached.

Second, the cultural navigation concern was legitimate but manageable.

The right candidate would not be someone who had only worked in agile, technology-first environments. It would be someone who had successfully led digital initiatives inside a traditional institutional framework before, and understood how to move at technology speed within a governance structure that moves at banking speed.

Strategic Talent Mapping focused on four pools. EVP and Director-level digital transformation leaders at foreign banks with Indonesia operations. Senior strategy and digital officers at domestic banks undergoing core banking modernization. Digital product leaders at Indonesian fintech companies who had previously worked in conventional banking and retained institutional fluency. And management consultants specializing in financial services digital transformation who had transitioned or were ready to transition to a principal leadership role.

AlvaHunt delivered five candidates within 2 weeks. Each profile included a specific assessment of institutional navigation experience, documenting how the candidate had managed transformation initiatives within traditional governance structures.

Three candidates advanced to interviews. The preferred candidate, a former Director of Digital Strategy at a regional bank in Singapore who had led that institution's Indonesia digital product launch before returning to Jakarta, accepted the offer after AlvaHunt facilitated compensation alignment with the revised framework.

The Result

Services Used

Board & C-Suite Search · Leadership & Market Intelligence

Why This Search Succeeded

Three interventions determined the outcome. Compensation recalibration before outreach began resolved the primary reason strong candidates had disengaged in previous attempts. 

Institutional navigation experience as an assessment criterion filtered for candidates who could actually succeed in the bank's operating environment, not just perform well in interviews. And a fourth candidate pool, management consulting professionals with financial services digital transformation experience, surfaced a candidate type the bank's regional HR network had not previously reached.

For foreign financial institutions in Indonesia navigating digital transformation, the EVP Strategy and Digital profile sits at the hardest intersection in executive hiring: commercial credibility, technological fluency, and institutional navigation capability combined. 

Executive search that maps all relevant pools and resolves structural friction before outreach begins consistently outperforms approaches that launch without that preparation.