Digital Debrief

Recently a finalist in the 2021 CIO of the year awards, Andrew is a customer-focused technology leader who has spent most of his career in the IT and Telecommunications sectors, working across fixed and mobile technologies serving business, wholesale, government and end-consumers.

Originally from Melbourne Australia, Andrew spent eight and a half years with nbn building and running Australia’s wholesale broadband access network in a number of senior leadership roles. His time at nbn included the IT implementation for the HFC rollout, leading the Systems Engineering team of 1300 resources and kicking off their Field Services transformation program.

Andrew also led the agile strategy and transformation that brought business and technology people together into cross function teams aligned to key business processes and covering all technologies. He moved nbn’s software engineering capability to a 100% on-shore model and merged the network and software engineers into the same squads to achieve end to end outcomes for the business, rolling out a Scaled Agile Framework across the organisation.

Andrew moved to Auckland to join Vodafone NZ as Chief Information Officer in 2019 in the same month Vodafone New Zealand was sold by Vodafone Global, and has taken Vodafone on their journey towards engineering excellence, agile ways of working and a brave new world of self sufficiency and independence. And today, we’re lucky enough to have him on the show.

Dil is on a mission to grow NZ's emerging startup ecosystem. She has worked in various roles from investment to hands-on operational leadership roles at many tech start-ups. She is also Startup Genome’s Ambassador for NZ, a Programme Manager & Business Coach with Catalysr (Australia, NZ), an accelerator for migrant and ex refugee entrepreneurs. She was one of EY’s 2015 cohort of Entrepreneurial Winning Women.

In this episdoe Dil chats to us about Athena X Ventures, which is a digital incubator for women and diverse founders in tech, science, arts, and media. Providing them with the resources and information they need to thrive, and guiding them through New Zealand’s start-up ecosystem.

Ruby is part of the CEO Collective and Product at Joyous. Joyous is a Kiwi Tech company helping large organisations include their people in making change happen. The way they do that is with their two-way conversational feedback platform. They are known for taking employee feedback, making it open instead of anonymous, using it outside of just HR topics and giving people a voice that actually gets heard.

Prior to this, Ruby helped other Kiwi startups achieve global success within the engineering and product functions. She is also the co-authr of Joyfully, a book about shared leadership, modern organisational structures and a new way of working for product and engineering teams.

Sonya has experience in global marketing and product management. She worked in the tech scene for a number of years, most recently at Xero and Kiwibank.

At Sharesies, Sonya’s main focus is to lead the best user experience and outcomes, in the product and in marketing. Along with her co-founders, Sonya saw an opportunity to make investing more accessible, providing everyone with an equal chance to grow their wealth.

In this episode Sonya will be talking about the digital transformation that Sharesies has been a part of, providing the first digital platform for everyday kiwis to learn and invest in the NZX, ASX and US exchanges.

Sam’s a thought leader, storyteller and creative technology innovator. She’s spent over 20 years bringing stories and experiences to life, starting with digital and extending into exhibitions, and augmented and virtual reality.

As co-founder and Managing Director of award-winning creative tech studio Method and AR/VR studio M Theory, Sam is on a mission to foster greater collaboration within the tech and creative industries, with the goal of showcasing local talent and attracting international projects.

In this episode Sam talks to us about an interactive tool they worked on for the University of Auckland’s prospective students. Your World, Your Way was developed with the goal to engage prospective students in a new and refreshing way.

Lindsay joined Vodafone New Zealand as the Chief Enterprise Officer in September 2019. Lindsay is responsible for the end to end Enterprise business at Vodafone.

Prior to Vodafone, Lindsay was Microsoft’s US General Manager, Cloud & Enterprise Business Group, running a multibillion-dollar business consisting of Application, Infrastructure, Data and AI elements of Microsoft’s Software platforms.

Before her career at Microsoft, Lindsay managed a large engineering business unit at IBM and worked with a number of small and large companies with experience in engineering development and support roles in the UK, New Zealand and South Africa.

James is the Chief Operating Officer at Nikko Asset Management New Zealand. In this episode he chats to us about two projects that relate to a business objective to develop a direct to retail (B2C) offering, allowing retail investors to access the same products they have been managing for institutional clients for decades.

The first is GoalsGetter – An easy to use invest platform allowing clients to access their products and invest 100% digitally – the first digital advice platform in NZ.

And secondly the NZ Data Tools – The backbone data processing engine enabling Nikko to grow their business in a robust way – developed by CodeHQ.

Blair has over 25 years’ experience in the financial services industry, largely focused on insurance in New Zealand, Asia Pacific and the United Kingdom. In this episode he talks to us about Tower’s transformation to be a customer-focussed and digital first insurer that leverages data to provide simple and rewarding experiences for customers.

The transformation has seen the Tower business turn around and deliver continued profit growth. They have modernised their many legacy systems and simplified complex product offerings. Tower’s digital and data strategy is laying the groundwork to reshape the way they deliver insurance in New Zealand and the Pacific and it is all based on their relentless focus on customers.

Leigh has worked between New Zealand, Australia, China, Singapore, Hong Kong and the UK with the Chinese tech giants Tencent, Ant Financial, Baidu, JDPay and a number of the main Chinese banks, watching them grow, dominate and innovate in the Financial Technology sector.

Leigh is a board member of technology industry body NZTech, and has driven and exited two FinTech businesses securing global recognition from the Australia New Zealand Internet Awards (ANZIA) as Tech Start Up of The Year, Austin Texas’ South By South West FinTech & Payment Category 1 Minute Pitch and the New Zealand Hi-Tech Awards Start Up Of The Year.

As CEO since 2017, Daniel brings a background in global consulting and executive leadership. He has been leading Mobile Mentor in its transformation into a global Microsoft partner and building a team across New Zealand, Australia and the USA.

Jared spent 17 years at Microsoft in various roles including Finance, SMB Sales & Marketing. He also worked as Head of B2B at Samsung New Zealand before joining Mobile Mentor in 2020.

Today they will talk to us about the Alive Hospice project. Mobile Mentor worked with Nashville-based caregiving organisation, Alive Hospice, to enable what they call Zero Touch Provisioning - a service that enabled the hospice team to configure devices remotely without any manual effort. This enabled caregivers to attend to patients virtually, safely and effectively during various COVID-19 lockdowns.