Frank Wadsworth

Frank Wadsworth is Managing Director and Chief Procurement Officer for SMBC Group in the Americas. Frank has spent his career in financial services, having worked at some of the biggest names in banking:  Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Bloomberg, and now SMBC. Beginning his career in technology, Wadsworth gradually transitioned to assume a variety of vendor management leadership roles. 

Prior to joining SMBC, he led global supply chain operations for Bloomberg, while also establishing a third-party risk management programme for the firm, transforming a fragmented, reactive approach into a cohesive programme. This role at Bloomberg was preceded by a position leading strategic vendor management for J.P. Morgan’s investment banking division (IBD), as well as procurement professional services for the bank globally, with several billion dollars of spend under management. 

Several leadership roles at Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley followed, where Wadsworth was responsible for driving multi-million-dollar savings, improving process efficiencies, and reducing risk by identifying and establishing outsourcing, offshoring and shared services opportunities.

As Chief Procurement Officer for SMBC,  Wadsworth is leading the development and implementation of a multi-year target operating model for SMBC to provide a centralised, strategic, and value-driven procurement function that enables the timely delivery of quality goods and services to the business. 

“After finalising our target operating model towards the end of 2020, we hit the ground running in 2021, building the procurement team from four people to about40 resources, successfully implementing Coupa and standing up procurement operations for four of nine SMBC group companies,” says Wadsworth. “We are roughly one-year-old as a procurement organisation following our first implementation, and I’m proud to say we’ve accomplished a significant amount in a very short amount of time. 

“We’ve onboarded more than 1,000 suppliers with 75% of supplier invoices submitted and processed electronically – a significant paradigm shift from a year ago, when all invoices were processed manually. We’ve loaded more than 2,500 contracts into Coupa, with a steady number of new contracts authored and approved through Coupa and executed through DocuSign every day. 

“Separately, we’ve established a supplier spend analytics data lake with PowerBI dashboards that allows us to quickly and easily assess spend across multiple regions, businesses, and spend categories. The data lake houses over two million records containing spend information for the past six years.”

Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC) was founded more than 400 years ago when the Sumitomo and Mitsui family businesses came together, bringing together their diverse products and services and expanding their business. The Mitsui Bank was established in 1876 followed by the establishment of the Sumitomo Bank in 1895. Two decades later, the first branch was opened in the U.S. in San Francisco and in 1918, the New York Agency was established. In the intervening years, the Sumitomo Bank and the Mitsui Bank opened different offices and branches including in Brazil and Los Angeles.  The two banks merged in April 2001, forming what is now SMBC.  The firm has a long-standing tradition of serving clients and businesses around the world with more than 86,000 employees across the globe in 140 offices in nearly 40 countries.

Read the full story HERE.