About Mark
Mark Willis is Managing Director and Global Head of Emerging Payments at Standard Chartered, where he leads the strategy and commercialisation of the bank’s emerging payment solutions across tokenised deposits, blockchain payment rails, stablecoins and agentic commerce. His mandate is to build next-generation settlement capability, the real-time, programmable and always-on movement of money, and take it to corporates and financial institutions worldwide.
That work is already live. In August 2026 Standard Chartered and HSBC executed the first live tokenised deposit transaction on Swift’s blockchain-based ledger, and Mark has described tokenised deposits as a key pillar of the bank’s digital assets strategy, which aims to let clients transact, settle and manage tokenised liquidity across borders.
Over a career of more than 20 years he has led growth, transformation and platform innovation across global financial services, in leadership positions at Standard Chartered, Standard Bank, IBM and Accenture, and is known for bridging commercial strategy with deep technology expertise. He holds a Master’s degree in IT Management and has completed executive education programmes at MIT, Oxford and INSEAD. His perspective matters here because an agent can only act on money as fast as the rails beneath it settle, and those are the rails he is building: the ones that will move institutional money in real time, on-chain and around the clock.
Areas of Expertise
- Payments
- Digital Assets
- Banking
- Market Infrastructure
- AI
