J.P. Morgan’s investment bank CIO, Mark Ashton-Rigby, has left to join Barclays

Mark Ashton-Rigby left his role as J.P. Morgan's chief information officer for its corporate and investment bank yesterday. He will be joining Barclays as group CIO in August.

Ashton-Rigby left the bank yesterday, according to sources close to the situation, after just over three years at the bank. He joined from UBS in 2013, initially as head of banking technology, but was promoted to the CIO of its investment bank in September last year.

In a memo sent to staff yesterday, Sanoke Viswanathan, chief administrative officer for J.P. Morgan’s corporate and investment bank, said that Ashton-Rigby was leaving for "another role outside of the firm".

That role, we can confirm, is leading Barclays technology functions as group chief information officer in yet another example of senior J.P. Morgan staff defecting to Barclays under the new rein of Jes Staley. Ashton-Rigby has a mere three months of gardening leave, and will be joining the bank in August.

Paul Compton, Barclays chief operating officer who joined from J.P. Morgan in February, is believed to the one who earmarked Ashton-Rigby for the CIO role. Headhunters are expecting more J.P. Morgan tech appointments over the next few months as Ashton-Rigby gets his feet under the table.

Ashton-Rigby relocated to New York from London when he moved from UBS, but is set to return to the City for the new job at Barclays.

Barclays confirmed the appointment.

Viswanathan will be taking on Ashton-Rigby’s responsibilities until a full-time replacement is found. It's understood that J.P. Morgan is keen to find a replacement swiftly for such a critical function. Across the whole organisation, J.P. Morgan employs over 33,000 technology staff.

Ashton-Rigby spent less than a year leading technology at UBS’s investment bank in London before moving to J.P. Morgan's New York office in 2013. Before this, he worked in various technology roles at Deutsche Bank, where he spent 13 years.

Investment banks are viewing technology as a more critical function than ever, and movement in the senior ranks has become decidedly more frequent.

“The pressure on investment banks’ CIOs currently is intense. Cost-cutting is top of the agenda, but the need to innovate has never been greater in the wake of a surge in fintech start-ups,” says Paul Bennie, managing director of technology recruiters Bennie Maclean.

In March Credit Suisse hired Simon Tasker, the former head of capital markets technology at Deloitte, as a managing director and Stuart Bevan joined Deutsche Bank to lead its cash equities technology division.

J.P. Morgan declined to comment.

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