The Big Interview: Jim Adams

The Stack is resurfacing some of our favourite "Big Interviews' from 2025 as we close off the year. This piece first appeared on October 1.

Former barman, construction worker and clothes shop assistant Jim Adams only went into technology so he could “be in the dry and warm.”

Starting his career as a teenage data processor, he wound up as Group CTO at Citibank after a distinguished career at Goldman, then Deutsche Bank as CTO, Global Markets and JP Morgan before landing at Citi; pretty dry, pretty warm.

Adams, who left Citi in 2024 after serving nearly five years as CTO and head of the bank's technology infrastructure group, has spent his time after standing down distilling his experience into "The Creative CTO."

The UK-native turned New York-resident hopes that the book can be a toolkit for aspiring technology leaders navigating the complexities of enterprise transformation – which can, at Citi scale, be immense.

At the bank he oversaw technology for approximately 12,000 people.

Sitting down at an exclusive event by The Stack, he says that "At Citi, I'm pretty sure just about everybody in the organization knew what our strategy was, knew why we were doing it, knew how we were doing it."

That wasn't the case everywhere...

No degree; no problem.

Adams’s start in IT wasn’t a conventional one.

He never went to university and worked in bars and shops, before becoming a data processor at Provident Mutual. There, his manager Janet Tyler and his father pushed Adams to take an aptitude test to get into the company’s graduate scheme for programmers. (“I absolutely think if it wasn't for Janet Tyler, I wouldn't have had the career I had,” he says.)

Adams passed, and so began his career as a technical manager at “the tender age of 19.”

He writes in The Creative CTO that he was convinced his lack of degree put him at a disadvantage, which set him on “a path of self-improvement, research, and study,” that became, he says, the habit of a lifetime.

(One former colleague at The Stack’s event refers to him as ‘Da Vinci’ in admiration at his breadth of skills – and penchant for sketching deep architectural plans on the nearest surface, including windows.)

> Jim's approach to architectural thinking in his own words <

Adams moved companies multiple times early in his career (Provident Mutual, to RAC, to Oracle) striving to remain in technically-focused roles.

Typically, however he would inevitably end up with a larger and larger team of engineers to manage: “Though I didn’t know it at the time, I was honing a variety of skills that I would ultimately need as a CTO,” he writes.

"I don't know what that IS!"

When Adams started at Deutsche Bank in 2015 he was asked to look at the bank’s architecture. “I was like, ‘I don't know what that is.’ We didn't really have that sort of practice at Goldman Sachs,” he says to The Stack.

From working at Citi and JP Morgan, he tells the group, he learned large enterprises need a simple definition of architecture that can be translated across various levels of the business: “At Goldman's, I really felt the business was very tech-savvy. (...) You'll have a tech and a business head co-manage a group.”

“I took that for granted for 15 years. Then I went to Deutsche Bank and it was very different. The senior levels of business leaders didn't really understand the technology aspects and how it could improve their business lines,” he says.

Adams says simplifying his technological vision to communicate it to business executives was essential.

“I realized that there was a translation layer that was necessary if you were gonna be a senior and successful technology leader, in order to explain it in a language that business or board members could understand.”

Adams’s book outlines the compact architectural framework he designed, spanning five “disciplines”: business, application, information, technology and security, and three “levels” of architecture, enterprise, solutions and software.

"There's the enterprise architecture, which is really the highest level,” he explains. “Think of the board supervisors, the regulators; how you get sponsorship for the activities that you need to do to fix the enterprise.

“When you're actually fixing the enterprise, you're at solutions architecture. This is when you're costing out, you're putting forward the things that you need to, to accomplish. And then there's software architecture, which is when you're actually building the solutions.”

Once this overview has been established, “It's easy to look at the standards aligning with the disciplines, the control tollgates aligning with the levels,” he tells the audience.

The framework also simplifies creating policies, governance and standards. He thinks it's future-proof too, even in a world where the shift to platform engineering has changed things for many.

Coming into a new enterprise? Reshuffle time

Reading Adams book, he outlines how a CTO should set target states for enterprise architecture and establish core strategies. He is less specific about how an executive can execute these ambitions – including culturally when most leaders encounter that “permafrost” of resistance.

Asked about this by The Stack he says, “My rule of thumb was probably fire 40% of my leadership team and hire their replacements.” (“THAT’s what I’m doing wrong” came an amused mutter from our audience.)

Yes, efforts have to be made to get people on board but there’s always obstreperous holdouts. And “if they're not pulling in the same direction with you, they were gonna be pulling against you,” Adams said.

Lack of board-level oversight in tech

Throughout his career across Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan, and Citi, Adams has consistently encountered a challenging dynamic: “I've always found that the board-level oversight isn't where it needs to be for technology," Adams tells The Stack.

Adams's solution has been to invest heavily in communication and education. Adams is a self-professed “long-form” thinker. Both in the interview and in his book, he shares his appreciation for Jeff Bezos’s famous “6 pager” approach.

“I think actually I was probably an anomaly in financial services, because so much of large enterprises is driven through PowerPoint presentations and quick decisions,” he tells The Stack.

“I've always been the person who's been a long-form thinker and written the more detailed white papers to understand and conceive a problem and a set of solutions. Because you can actually abridge that to a presentation. Going the other direction is a hell of a lot harder… I'm an outcome person, but a lot of those larger institutions measure progress by activity. Whereas I was like, ‘Okay, the activity will come later. Let's actually work out what the outcome is first.’"

Innovation in a highly regulated environment

Adams worked in financial services for the majority of his career.

An audience member at the event questions how Adams encourages innovation and teams moving quickly within large enterprises with lots of structure and regulatory hurdles – is it worth creating “startups” within such large banks, they wonder?

“I've seen innovation spun off to one side, it's never worked, because it's… kind of doing the shiny and the new without looking at the realities of how you adopt it within the actual business line that's running,” he reveals.

Adams goes on to describe how he integrates new tech into these environments by labeling it “bleeding”, “cutting” or “leading” edge.

“Bleeding” edge technology is “it's something that's way out there,” Adams explains. “It may or may not have consequence to the business line I'm working with, but I'm gonna keep an eye on it.”

When that tech becomes relevant to the business it’s then “cutting” edge. Adams says he would then create a group of experts from across different lines within the company (“basically enthusiastic people who are interested in that technology”) to research the tech.

"If they think it has relevance, they actually wanna start putting something into production, then it moves to leading-edge technology,” he says. At that point, the group should conduct an assessment of relevant existing standards and policies to analyse what might be compromised if that technology was brought on board.

“Make those amendments and agree it with audit, agree it with regulators, that's how you're changing it, and then they can get a pilot into production.”

“The moment it ceases to be just a pilot in production of leading-edge technology, is when it's fully adopted into all the standards, into all the tooling, and then it's just another technology.”

Escalate issues early

In The Creative CTO, Jim shares a few pieces of more general advice from his 35-year career at some of the world’s biggest banks, including the key values he shares with teams when taking on a new CTO role.

Just two examples: “Deliver what our customers need, not what they say they want,” or “Take ownership, but escalate issues early.”

He adds; “In terms of motivation, technologists are not so different from non-technologists. Everyone tends to like upgraded corporate titles, flexible working arrangements, and pay increases.

“But there is one trait that seems to be a more prevalent motivator for technologists: public recognition of their solutions and achievements.”

He writes CTOs have a unique opportunity to produce innovative technology at their firms and celebrate the people who come up with these solutions.

Jim tells the audience of gathered technologists and execs that “The nice thing about technology, it was always changing.”

“The velocity of change is probably faster than I've ever seen in my career, but that doesn't mean that it's not addressable, that you can't study it and understand it.” Harnessing this curiosity and using it to you and your business's advantage is vital to being a successful CTO, Jim says.