A Global Power Leader – Dr. Marry Gunaratnam: Breaking Barriers in Banking & Finance to Bring in the Tech-Transformation
The old have always been afraid of the new. Because novelty brings in a change that is disruptive. As a Global Power Leader at the UK Parliament, Dr. Marry Gunaratnam‘s rise to the top was full of challenges, major amongst them being bringing that unique tech-transformation by breaking rigid old barriers in the banking and finance industries.
An Advisory Board Member at Hi2AI, financial fintech frontiers, Dr. Gunaratnam’s professional journey has unfolded at the intersection of engineering and human-centred leadership. Trained as an engineer, her early career focused on building and operating large-scale, mission-critical systems in highly regulated environments. Over more than 20 years, she progressed into senior executive leadership roles across global financial services and technology organizations, including executive positions at JP Morgan and, today, as Senior Vice President of Information Technology at Northern Credit Union in Canada.
An Impact Beyond Banking and Fintech
While much of her career has been anchored in financial services, Dr. Gunaratnam’s impact extends well beyond banking. The same discipline required to protect financial systems became the foundation for her work advancing digital health innovation. Through initiatives such as IRIS (Intra-agency eReferral Information System) and the CCTC (Champlain Community Transportation Collaborative), she helped tackle healthcare’s most human problem: fragmentation. Patients navigating multiple providers, disconnected databases, and siloed systems often face delays that cost time—and sometimes lives. By building interoperable platforms that unified patient status, enabled real-time data sharing across hospitals, provincial agencies, and acute care facilities, and replaced manual coordination with digital workflows, Dr. Gunaratnam helped shift care delivery. In doing so, clinical decisions that once took hours of phone calls and faxes became instantaneous, improving confidence for care teams and measurably enhancing patient safety.
Her decision to remain in highly regulated industries—particularly financial services and adjacent public-interest sectors—was never driven by technology alone. It was driven by responsibility. In banking and healthcare infrastructure alike, technology is not merely a productivity tool; it is societal infrastructure. When systems fail, families, patients, and communities are directly affected. Dr. Gunaratnam chose to build her career in environments where reliability and trust are non-negotiable, because that is where technology carries its greatest social consequence.
Today, she leads enterprise-wide modernization initiatives that span banking transformation, digital experience platforms, cybersecurity and operational resilience, AI governance, cloud and infrastructure modernization, and the redesign of enterprise operating models to support scalable, future-ready growth.
Answering Unspoken Questions
Coming back to the challenges, the hardest one in Dr. Gunaratnam’s career has been leading transformation inside organizations shaped by uncertainty — and quiet fear.
In highly regulated environments, large-scale change does not simply disrupt systems, she says. It unsettles identity, security, relevance, and trust. Behind every transformation program sit unspoken questions: “Will my role still matter? Will I be exposed to risk? Will the organization I know still exist?” she asks.
Learning A Defining Truth—The Human Cost of Change
Early in her executive journey, Dr. Gunaratnam learned a defining truth: even the most rigorously engineered transformation strategy can fail when leaders underestimate the human cost of change. Her turning point came when she fundamentally changed how she led transformation. She stopped leading with delivery plans and milestones. She began leading with trust. She slowed the pace of conversation — even when timelines demanded speed. She invested deeply in explaining why change was necessary and where uncertainty genuinely existed. Psychological safety became an intentional design principle inside every program she led. The lesson that reshaped Dr. Gunaratnam’s leadership was deceptively simple — and permanently transformative: “Transformation does not succeed because leaders move faster. It succeeds because people feel safe enough to move with them.”
Steadiness as a Leadership Discipline
Dr. Gunaratnam believes that steadiness in leadership is a discipline. In environments where cyber incidents can unfold in minutes, market confidence can shift in hours, and regulatory expectations can change overnight, leaders are surrounded by noise that constantly demands reaction. The danger, she says, is not disruption itself. The danger is allowing urgency to replace judgment.
When everything is loud, she deliberately becomes quieter. She teaches her teams that speed is not the same as progress. She also separates what must be stabilized from what can be optimized. Crisis leadership, in her view, is not about fixing everything at once. It is about protecting the few things that hold the organization upright while the rest is repaired methodically.
A steady head, she believes, comes from knowing what not to react to. Goals do not disappear when conditions change. They become harder to see. So she protects the line of sight to purpose—returning her leadership teams, again and again, to the long arc of what they are building: capability, trust, and resilience. Short-term turbulence is treated as operational weather, not a strategic signal.
Balance as an Operational Demand
Dr. Gunaratnam does not speak about balance as a personal preference. She speaks about it as an operational requirement for leadership. In an era defined by permanent urgency—always-on systems, real-time crises, public scrutiny, regulatory pressure, and algorithmic speed—she believes leaders are quietly being asked to perform superhuman levels of cognitive labour without redesigning how human capacity actually works.
Burnout, in her view, has been dangerously rebranded as dedication. Exhaustion is mistaken for drive. Dr. Gunaratnam takes a different approach. She designs her personal capacity for resilience. Reflection is deliberately protected. Time with family is not viewed as time away from leadership, but as a necessary anchor for perspective and judgment. A quiet space is not unproductive; it is where strategic clarity and sound decision-making are formed. Continuous learning is not optional development—it is how leaders remain cognitively adaptive in an environment of constant technological and organizational change. From her experience, leadership today is no longer defined by the ability to react rapidly to disruption. It is defined by the ability to remain internally stable while navigating sustained complexity.
A Distinct Competitive Edge
Dr. Gunaratnam believes the next generation of executives will not be defined by functional mastery alone. They will be defined by their ability to translate complexity into organizational confidence—connecting digital capability to human outcomes, financial performance, regulatory trust, and long-term resilience.
For the organizations she leads, Dr. Gunaratnam envisions a fundamentally different kind of competitive advantage. She sees future-ready institutions becoming platform-driven, data-enabled, and trust-anchored enterprises—able to scale at speed while remaining deeply human in how they serve customers and communities.
In practical terms, that future is shaped by three ambitions.
~To operate on unified digital and core platforms that eliminate fragmentation and enable rapid product and service innovation.
~To embed intelligence into everyday operations so teams can anticipate needs instead of reacting to them.
~And to become architecturally ready for open ecosystems, real-time services, and AI-enabled capabilities—without compromising security, privacy, or regulatory confidence.
The Next Phase of Growth
According to Dr. Gunaratnam, across the credit union sector, the next phase of growth will not be driven by individual systems or isolated digital projects. It will be shaped by the ability to build a scalable, intelligent operating ecosystem—one that evolves continuously with member expectations, and an increasingly complex and competitive market structure.
Rather than modernizing in functional silos, leading credit unions are aligning their transformation agendas around a unified digital and operational foundation that removes fragmentation created by legacy platforms. A consistent member and employee experience becomes the baseline—not the end goal.
The Future Operating Model
At the same time, the future operating model is moving beyond reporting and analytics. Credit unions are increasingly embedding intelligence directly into daily operations—connecting interaction history and real-time data signals across channels so frontline teams and operations can act with contextual insight, not static information.
The Crucial Aspect
Equally critical is architectural readiness. Open banking participation, real-time payments, ecosystem partnerships, and AI-enabled services all demand a platform foundation that supports rapid innovation without increasing operational fragility and cybersecurity exposure. This requires deliberate investment in integration layers, data architecture, identity and access foundations, and shared services that allow new capabilities to be introduced without re-engineering the core each time.
For Dr. Gunaratnam, the future of sustainable growth for credit unions is no longer defined by transformation speed or technology adoption alone.
It is defined by one capability:
Adaptability. What will ultimately distinguish credit unions that keep pace with change from those that lead it is not technology adoption alone — but the institutional capability to continuously reshape platforms, processes, and operating models into a truly intelligent and scalable financial ecosystem.
Awards as the Validation of Impact
Dr. Marry Gunaratnam’s recognitions are not milestones pursued for visibility, but markers of meaningful and sustained impact.
She has been named among Canada’s Top 40 Under 40, she was also recognized as a Businesswoman of the Year finalist for Lifetime Achievement, and most recently named a Finalist for Women of the Year at the Digital Engineering Awards, in recognition of her leadership in enterprise digital transformation and large-scale engineering modernization. These honours reflect the scale and complexity of the transformation she has led across highly regulated, mission-critical environments.
Internationally, Dr. Gunaratnam has been recognized as a Global Power Leader in enterprise digital transformation, engineering innovation, and AI, including recognition at the UK Parliament. She has also been featured in global leadership and innovation publications for her work in technology strategy, responsible AI governance, and digital infrastructure resilience.
Yet she is quick to reframe what recognition means. Awards, she says, are not for the spotlight. They are for the validation of impact. They represent the collective courage of teams who modernize legacy systems, and quietly build the foundations that communities depend on—often long before anyone notices the outcome.
Trust Built with Clarity That is Kind
Finally, for Dr. Gunaratnam, the quote she lives by is both simple and quietly demanding. From Brené Brown, the words — “Clear is kind.” — reflect a leadership discipline she practices daily. She believes clarity is one of the most underestimated acts of leadership: clear strategy reduces fear, clear expectations remove unnecessary stress, and clear communication builds trust long before results appear. In complex, high-pressure environments, ambiguity is rarely neutral — it becomes an emotional tax on teams, slowly draining focus, confidence, and momentum.
When leaders withhold direction or delay decisions, uncertainty quietly spreads. Dr. Gunaratnam has seen that most organizational strain does not come from heavy workloads but from unclear priorities, shifting narratives, and unspoken expectations. She often says that people can carry heavy work, but what they struggle with is carrying confusion. For her, clarity is not about being blunt; it is about being honest and timely, especially when the answer is uncomfortable or the path forward is complex.
Clarity, in her view, is not a communication style — it is a leadership responsibility. It is how leaders protect psychological safety, enable confident decision-making, and create the conditions for high performance under pressure. Whether guiding enterprise transformation, navigating risk, or leading teams through uncertainty, Dr. Gunaratnam believes that the true measure of leadership is whether people leave the room knowing exactly what matters, what comes next, and how their work connects to something meaningful.
“Clear is kind — and for her, it is how trust is built.”