End Users '20 under 40' 2014—Chris Hollingsworth

Chris Hollingsworth, 35

Manager of employee and physical security, Royal Bank of Canada, Toronto

Hollingsworth has a global role with Canada's largest bank, which has a presence in 46 countries and 79,000 employees. “Believe it or not, I do sleep at night sometimes,” he says. He manages the physical security standards and procedures for the deployment of bank equipment, such as safes and vaults, intrusion alarm systems, access control and video surveillance across his global properties. Most recently, he has been involved with the new Canadian Banking Headquarters in downtown Toronto, which includes 18 floors of office, convention and retail banking space.�The almost 600,000 square feet of space is secured using RBC's global access control platform and is fully integrated with more than 100 IP video cameras. He also has been working on a high security cash processing center utilizing integrated access control, intrusion and video surveillance systems.

What inspired you to get into the security industry?

My original plan was law enforcement, but I got involved in security at the end of university where I started off in employee investigations. �It was the many different aspects that I received exposure to that inspired me.� The industry has many different pillars and my career has progressed from there.

If you could have any technology you wanted, without regard to budget, what would it be?

I would love to have complete deployment of video analytics. It would allow us to tackle some of the vagrancy issues we have with our branches that have 24/7 ATM lobbies.� It also would be useful with the new retail concept of branches—we have 1,250 branches in Canada with many different and evolving marketing strategies. These differing retail layouts present security risks in different ways. The ability to track customers would allow the bank to be smarter with staffing while ensuring we can provide the right security at the right time, no matter what the setting.

What's your biggest physical security challenge today, and what do you think it will be five years from now?

Global standardization of equipment.� It seems like we are always in the process of mergers and acquisitions and often legacy equipment needs to be upgraded because it is not compatible with existing standards.� Quite often it is not the security equipment that is considered when looking at expansion, but it is a critical component that we must have working on day one.� This will always be a challenge, but in five years I hope that the global vendor network that we are currently establishing will be able to assist in making these transition periods a little easier.