Amanda Ward

Experience

Amanda joined Grant Thornton in August 2020 as a Partner in our Consulting team. Prior to joining Grant Thornton, Amanda spent 8 years with the Irish branch of an International Nordic Bank finishing in the role of Chief Operating Officer. Prior to this she spent 8 years with a Big Four firm where she worked with the Financial Effectiveness Consulting and Audit divisions.

Sector experience

Amanda led the successful transformation of an International Retail Bank. This involved the fundamental redesign and reorganisation of a full-service ‘live’ Retail Bank incorporating over 450 staff and 220,000 customers, into a business unit responsible for the controlled deleveraging of a €10bn balance sheet and wind-down of operations over a 7-year period.

Amanda brings authentic client-side experience, as demonstrated through her track record of success in the design and delivery of complex, high profile, multi-disciplinary FS programmes including:

• €3bn major outsourcing programmes;
• €2.5bn of loan portfolio transactions;
• mandatory regulatory projects such as GDPR and the Central Credit Register;
• tax Control framework implementation; and
• strategic 5 year succession plans for the residual units, including designing an appropriate operating model ensuring the continued servicing of the remaining customer portfolios and the retention of the necessary staff skillsets.

As COO, Amanda was highly attuned to C-suite level responsibilities and throughout her time in Danske, she engaged in successful cross-entity governance to achieve a consistent and transparent approach to risks, processes, information and reporting across internal, outsourced and Group functions. She is an excellent stakeholder manager, with the ability to influence and achieve buy-in at all levels, both internally and externally.

Amanda was considered a trusted advisor to the Bank and as such held positions as member of the CCMA Appeals Board, Bank Risk Committee, Management Committee and Group Advisory Forum. She has a track record of achievement in proactively identifying and resolving technical, regulatory and operational risk issues and ensuring the business had a robust compliance and control framework in place. Examples of this included:

• setting up the compliance and operational risk framework for a major outsourcing contract between a bank and a third-party loan servicer;
• design and delivery of a CCMA risk mitigation that satisfied the requirements of internal audit and the Central Bank of Ireland;
• responsible for risk management on multiple loan portfolios sales;
• design and implementation of the GDPR compliance programme; and
• responsible for the delivery of CBI remediation projects as well as implementation of new regulations such as the Central Credit Register.