Former BCG country head Douglas Jackson recruited to Standard Chartered

Standard Chartered has recruited former BCG Vietnam head Douglas Jackson as its new managing director for group strategy – marking the latest in a string of consultant signings.

Veteran Southeast Asian consultant Douglas Jackson has joined Standard Chartered as the bank’s new managing director for group strategy, with Jackson to be based out of Singapore. He crosses form a ten-year spell at BCG, where as a partner and managing director he previously headed the firm’s Vietnam office, having before that spent a decade at A.T. Kearney as its country manager for Thailand.

A Business Administration graduate from the University of Washington, Jackson kicked off his career in the banking sector in Asia, serving with the Bank of Montreal in Taiwan. From there, he joined J.P. Morgan for five years, before – on the back of an MBA in Finance and Strategy at Columbia Business School – embarking on a career in the consulting sector with A.T. Kearney in Thailand (this year rebranded as Kearney).

Acting as A.T. Kearney’s country manager for Thailand at around the time of its Bangkok office launch, Jackson spent a decade with the firm advising clients across Southeast Asia, Greater China, and Australia, before in 2008 crossing to BCG. A year later, Jackson would be sent on secondment as Executive Deputy Director at Vietnam International Bank in Hanoi, before settling with BCG in Ho Chi Minh City.

At BCG, Jackson was listed as a core member of the firm’s Financial Institutions, Global Advantage, Marketing, Sales & Pricing, People & Organisation, and Public Sector practices, but his client work focused primarily on the banking sector – with expertise in the areas of corporate strategy development and network transformation among other areas. In 2016 he graduated from Vietnam country head to senior advisor.

At Standard Chartered – which does the bulk of its business in emerging markets, and in particular Asia – Jackson will now oversee group strategy based out of Singapore, where the UK-headquartered bank has been active for over 150 years. His appointed follows on the heels of another BCG alumnus, Pierre Paoli, who joined as Standard Chartered CCIB global head of strategic initiatives at the start of last year.

Paoli had been with Boston Consulting Group for the previous eleven years (as a partner in London since 2015), where he served as the firm’s Wholesale Banking practice lead for Western Europe. Prior to that, he spent three and a half years at fellow management consultancy Oliver Wyman, joining the firm after gaining an engineering masters in applied mathematics with the National University of Singapore in 2003.

According to finance sector commentators – citing further recent recruits Christopher Williams (ex-Deloitte and Accenture) Sushil Anand (IBM, TSC), Jeroen Steenbergen (Accenture and KPMG) and Jay Cheah (Oliver Wyman) – the hiring spree of former consultants in strategy and tech roles at Standard Chartered fits within a wider restructuring initiative instituted by current CEO Bill Winters, who joined the bank in 2015.