Our Consultants
Sarah Chen joined Alden Advisory in 2018 and established Digital Transformation as a formal practice in 2019, as core banking migration became a signature engagement type for the firm.
Background
Sarah's central argument, repeated to nearly every client considering a core banking replacement, is that the technology risk is usually the smaller risk. The larger one is that a bank has to keep operating — taking payments, processing loans, staying open — for the two or three years it takes to migrate, and most implementation plans treat that continuity as an afterthought rather than the central design constraint.
Before joining Alden, Sarah worked on technology delivery inside two UK banks, which shaped her scepticism toward vendor-led transformation narratives that describe adoption as a training problem rather than a change management one.
She now leads the firm's growing body of work on AI governance in financial services, alongside her core banking and digital adoption engagements, and reviews every Digital Transformation case study before publication.
"Core banking replacement is a change management problem wearing a technology costume."
Sarah Chen — Senior Partner, Head of Digital TransformationCurrent research
Representative work