Rob Harding, Chief Operations and Technology Officer at bank Capital One, had a non-stop 2017, overseeing a stream of product and infrastructure innovations. The year saw his team create a credit rating platform that allows customers to check their credit information and generates leads for the business, which is a big player in credit cards and car loans. They launched a new web servicing platform and continued investing in Capital One's mobile app to encourage more customer self-service. Harding's function also pushed on with a movement out of on-premise data centres into public cloud, generating immediate value for the data and analytics programmes. The implementation of robotic process automation has saved tens of thousands of hours' worth of backoffice work. Capital One Europe's security operations centre was opened to work with equivalents in Capital One's North American business to provide round-the-clock monitoring. He has delivered proof of concept on a mobile solution for customers in financial difficulty. And numerous innovations in data sciences involving machine learning have improved underwriting effectiveness.