Ewan MacLeod

Founder

Ewan is the founder of New Era Digital Partners, a boutique advisory firm based in Dubai, working with Financial Service providers, FinTechs and Government agencies to deliver and enable transformative digital experiences.

As Chief Transformation Officer at Sohar International Bank in Oman, Ewan was responsible for translating the CEO’s vision of a ‘digitally native bank’ into reality through a mix of technology projects, programmes, and people initiatives. He implemented 6 strategic projects worth $60m to prepare the bank for its upcoming merger with HSBC Oman. 

Before this, Ewan was Chief Digital Officer at Nordea, the largest bank in Northern Europe. He implemented a digital-first strategy, driving revenue growth and cost efficiencies and sponsored an innovation culture, resulting in dozens of FinTech partnerships. He established the bank’s corporate venture fund and supervised a series of strategic investments into FinTechs to support the bank’s franchise. 

Prior to Nordea, Ewan led the £250m retail digital transformation programme for Royal Bank of Scotland in the United Kingdom. Before this, he worked with a variety of other financial service companies to deliver digital change. 

During University, Ewan founded his first company as a dotcom era digital services provider, raising $1m from a US venture capitalist in the process. He created the software and infrastructure for each of his companies, favouring the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP). He established multiple start-ups across the digital ecosystem in the UK and beyond, winning a variety of awards in the process.