A retirement savings specialist is putting technology at the centre of its growth plan. Standard Life has appointed its first Chief Digital and Technology Officer, a newly minted role designed to knit together the firm's Enterprise Technology function under a single leader.

The person stepping into it is Wendy Redshaw, who joins after eight years at NatWest Group and brings a track record built across some of the UK's largest financial institutions.

A new seat at the leadership table

Standard Life, which focuses on pensions, retirement and long-term savings, says the CDTO position is meant to bring enterprise architecture, advanced analytics, cyber resilience and artificial intelligence together under one leadership mandate.

The company's reasoning is that consolidating these areas will lift operational efficiency, strengthen digital customer engagement across the whole savings journey, and supply the scalable foundation it needs to grow within the UK retirement market. In short, the role exists to make technology a driver of the strategy rather than a support function running alongside it.

Who Wendy Redshaw is

Redshaw arrives from NatWest Group, where she spent the last eight years of her career and served for more than six of them as Chief Digital Information Officer for the retail arm.

Her experience reaches well beyond that. Earlier in her career she held managerial and executive positions at Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group, giving her a broad view of how large institutions run their digital and technology operations. On joining, she pointed to Standard Life's clear sense of purpose, its ambition and its customer focus as what drew her in, adding that she was keen to build on foundations already in place at what she called an important moment for the business.

Technology, digital, data and AI can help organisations simplify complexity, improve experiences and deliver better outcomes for customers. — Wendy Redshaw, incoming CDTO

Betting bigger on AI

The appointment follows Standard Life's stated intention to weave AI more deeply into its platform, and there are already concrete examples of that push.

In August 2026 the firm rolled out its first AI Coach inside its Homebuyer Hub, aimed at helping customers navigate home buying alongside their retirement planning. The tool walks users through questions on affordability, mortgages and deposits, and lets them add details such as salary or deposit size to get explanations tailored to their situation. It sits within a wider set of technology tools, including a Mixed Income Builder for more personalised retirement income planning and an upgraded Retirement Income Tool that lets pension members model how career breaks, part-time work or a phased retirement would affect their finances inside the app.

Rebuilding the platform underneath

Behind the customer-facing tools sits a large migration effort, and technology is central to how the company plans to serve savers going forward.

As a three-year strategy winds down, Standard Life reports that three quarters of its customer policies now sit on modern, target-state architecture. Along the way it moved 1.9 million policies onto the TCS BaNCS platform and shifted another 1.9 million onto Wipro's ALPHA platform. Redshaw will take charge of the next stage of that digital evolution and platform integration, building on those migration and growth milestones. Standard Life has not confirmed an exact start date, saying only that she will join in the coming months.