Christian Gosch, CIO of Erste Bank, only ended up in banking because he wanted a job that would place emphasis on enterprise architecture and, at the time he entered the business, banks were becoming interested in this concept.
Twenty years on, and Mr Gosch has kept this ideal, pulling Erste Bank through the first phase of an extensive upgrade to core banking solutions across its central and eastern Europe (CEE) markets at a time when its underperforming Hungarian operations and a goodwill write-off in Romania have dragged down group earnings to a net loss of €718.9m at the end of 2011.
