Driving Scalable Innovation: Robert Wibring on Leading IT Operations at Enity Bank Group
As Head of IT Operations at Enity Bank Group, Robert Wibring plays a pivotal role in building a resilient, secure, and agile technology foundation for one of the Nordics’ most forward thinking financial institutions. From his early days at Klarna to navigating a major post merger integration at Enity, Robert brings over 15 years of experience in leading infrastructure, cloud strategy, and digital transformation initiatives. In this executive insight, he shares how his team is modernising legacy systems, embedding cybersecurity and compliance into daily workflows, and using technology as a catalyst to support financial inclusion. His leadership philosophy centers on collaboration, transparency, and enabling teams to learn fast and deliver with confidence.
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Professional Background: Can you share your career journey leading up to your current role as Head of IT Operations at Enity Bank Group? How have your previous experiences prepared you for this position?
I joined Klarna in 2008 as a Junior Sysadmin and Support Engineer, back when the company was still small, with around 90 employees across two Nordic countries. What started as a temporary job between university semesters turned into a 10 year journey. After four years, I became Manager of the Support Team, and three years after that, I took over Corporate IT. By the time I left, the company had grown to 3,000 employees across more than 10 countries, including the US. The fast-paced growth and the trust and responsibility I was given helped me grow significantly, both personally and professionally.
Two key experiences from my time at Klarna really prepared me for my current role. First, the wide range of responsibilities I held as an IT manager gave me hands-on experience with many different technologies, especially during a period of rapid expansion. Second, because Klarna was also a bank, security was paramount, and I quickly became involved in compliance and regulatory matters from an early stage in my career.
Role and Responsibilities: What are your primary responsibilities as the Head of IT Operations at Enity Bank Group? How do you ensure alignment between IT operations and the bank’s strategic objectives?
In my role, I’m responsible for our cloud platforms and infrastructure, ensuring they are available, resilient, secure, compliant, and cost effective. I also oversee the bank’s digital workplace, which encompasses how our employees use technology to access productivity tools, internal systems, and engage with customers.
I work closely with our development teams and product owners to ensure that our core services and cloud platforms enable their vision rather than become an obstacle. I also collaborate with other parts of the organisation to explore how we can automate or use technology to reduce repetitive tasks, allowing teams to focus on more value adding work.
Additionally, my role involves close cooperation with security and risk teams to ensure our technology roadmap balances innovation with strong security and regulatory compliance.
IT Integration Post-Merger: Following the merger with Bank2 and the consolidation under the Enity Bank Group brand, what were the key IT integration challenges you faced, and how did you address them?
Post-merger IT integration is, in my opinion, one of the most complex and impactful projects you can undertake. There are many aspects that need to be balanced simultaneously, from technological platforms and data structures to people and culture. Our key challenges included transforming the product portfolio into our own systems while mapping product parity, managing communication send outs, meeting regulatory requirements, and dealing with a completely different data structure.
To tackle this, we quickly established a steering group with representatives from all areas of both organisations and mapped them to different “streams,” each responsible for specific aspects of the integration. We met weekly to track progress and align on dependencies across the streams. To avoid becoming overwhelmed from the outset, we divided the work into milestones based on hard legal deadlines and prioritised business value.
Digital Transformation Initiatives: Enity Bank Group emphasises making banking simple and accessible. What digital transformation initiatives have you implemented to enhance customer experience and operational efficiency?
During the merger, we had subsets of raw data stored without an effective interface for querying, accessing, or using it. We conducted a proof of concept using our own internal AI instance to create a user friendly interface that allows data to be queried and utilised without requiring prior knowledge of query languages. We’re now exploring similar use cases to rapidly unlock further efficiency gains across the organisation.
On the customer experience side, we recently launched an AI-powered conversational chatbot assistant. It’s designed to support our customers and website visitors by answering general questions about the bank, assisting with their interactions, and handling common customer service inquiries.
Cybersecurity Measures: In the evolving landscape of cyber threats, how does Enity Bank Group ensure the security and integrity of its IT infrastructure and protect customer data?
We take a risk based, proactive approach to securing our IT infrastructure by leveraging modern technologies that reduce exposure and enable early threat detection. As cyber threats continue to evolve, we focus on staying ahead through continuous monitoring, regular security audits, and up to date threat intelligence.
We also recognise that people play a critical role in cybersecurity. Beyond implementing robust technologies, we emphasise fostering a strong security culture, delivering regular training and embedding security as an integral part of the product development lifecycle.
Digital Transformation: What’s your strategy for modernising legacy systems without disrupting ongoing operations?
Modernising legacy systems requires a careful, phased approach that balances innovation with stability. My strategy begins with a thorough assessment, understanding system dependencies, business impact, and existing pain points. From there, we prioritise components that are either high risk or high value, often starting with those that can be decoupled and modernised incrementally.
We typically adopt a “strangler pattern,” where new services are built alongside legacy systems and gradually take over functionality. This approach enables us to introduce modern tech stacks and cloud capabilities without a disruptive “big bang” migration. At every stage, we ensure rollback plans are in place, and maintain close communication with business stakeholders to align expectations and manage risk.
By modernising in parallel while keeping legacy systems stable, we minimise disruption and steadily transition toward a more agile, scalable architecture that supports long term growth.
Technical Debt vs. Innovation: What’s been your biggest challenge in maintaining a balance between reducing technical debt and delivering new features, and how have you addressed it?
Aligning business urgency and feature requests with addressing underlying technical debt is always a challenge, as the latter often lacks immediate, visible impact or value. In the past, we encountered performance and stability issues that stemmed from prioritising quick wins and deferring refactoring during a period of rapid feature releases, growth, and expansion into new markets.
To tackle this, we shifted the conversation with stakeholders and introduced a more transparent framework for quantifying technical debt. We mapped it to risk, support overhead, and future development costs to help visualise the long term impact of neglecting these areas. We also adopted a dual track approach, ensuring that each sprint includes both feature development and scheduled technical debt reduction.
It’s still a balancing act, and stakeholder communication remains crucial, but this approach has significantly improved the reliability and resilience of our systems.
Regulatory Compliance: With the financial industry’s stringent regulatory environment, how does the IT Operations team ensure compliance while maintaining agility in operations?
It’s a balance between the “iron fist” and the “velvet glove.” I believe it’s important not to treat compliance as a checkpoint or a one time hurdle but to weave it directly into our workflows. For example, we enforce policy through infrastructure as code and use real time monitoring to track adherence, making compliance a core part of our DevOps engine.
Both our operations and development teams treat audit findings as backlog items, addressed alongside feature development. This ensures that compliance is built in from the start, rather than patched on later, with everything logged and traceable. We also keep access management centralised and tightly controlled, using just in time access for privileged roles. This means elevated access must be temporarily checked out and is always logged, further reinforcing compliance while maintaining operational agility.
Team Development and Leadership: What strategies do you employ to build and lead a high performing IT operations team, and how do you foster continuous learning and innovation within the team?
My strategy focuses on fostering a culture of trust, ownership, and curiosity. I prefer to set clear goals and boundaries rather than dictate how each problem should be solved or which specific solution to use, though I’m always available to coach and discuss different approaches when needed.
My team is diverse, with engineers from a range of technical backgrounds. Our support and CloudOps engineers work closely together, sharing the same space and holding joint meetings. The support team acts as our eyes and ears within the organisation. Since they’re often the first to detect issues or observe the effects of infrastructure changes, it’s crucial that they can feed this information back directly to the cloud infrastructure team.
I believe in empowering teams to own outcomes and creating an environment where failure is viewed as a learning opportunity. I encourage the team to continuously challenge the status quo and run small proof of concept tests frequently. To further support innovation and alignment, my team is actively involved in our division’s architecture forums, demo sessions, and increment planning. This integration ensures close collaboration with development and product teams, allowing us to add real value to the company’s product vision.
Future Outlook: What are your key priorities for Enity Bank Group’s IT operations in the coming years, and how do you plan to support the bank’s mission to increase financial inclusion in society?
Looking ahead, my priority is to continue making our platform leaner and more efficient, focusing on resilience at scale without over engineering or adding unnecessary complexity. The goal is to build a truly cloud native platform that leverages infrastructure as code, embedded FinOps practices, and automated scaling to support evolving demands seamlessly.
Another core focus is maintaining strong collaboration between IT operations, product, and development teams. By aligning closely with them, we can best support our shared vision of driving automation, increasing operational efficiency, and accelerating growth.
Ultimately, our collective mission is to expand financial empowerment by recognising the full potential of our customers. We aim to make banking simple, accessible, and future ready for everyone, advancing financial inclusion through thoughtful, scalable technology.
In Association with:
Playground Tech is a Stockholm‑based cloud consultancy and managed services provider specialising in AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Established in 2018, our certified engineers and architects make complex cloud platforms accessible, delivering reliable, scalable, and cost‑efficient infrastructure 24/7. Recognised as Sweden’s fastest-growing company in 2023, we accelerate time‑to‑market and enhance productivity through progressive engineering and full-service cloud programs. As part of the Playground Group, we partner closely with clients to build resilient, compliant, and future‑ready cloud environments, helping businesses innovate confidently.
