娇色导航

Cathy O'Sullivan?

Welcome to 娇色导航Leadership Live Australia. I'm Cathy O'Sullivan, editorial director for Foundry's enterprise and channel brands in Australia and New Zealand. On today's episode, I'm delighted to be joined by Eglantine Etiemble, who is Group Chief Technology Officer technology at PEXA.

Eglantine was ranked number three in the 2023 CIO50 Australia and it's an absolute pleasure to have her on the podcast today. Bonjour. Welcome. ? Eglantine Etiemble? Bonjour.

Thanks so much for having me. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

Great to catch up with you again and look to start us off today, I'd love to hear more about your career to date. How did you get your start in it? And what have been some of your career milestones? ? Eglantine Etiemble? Thanks.

It's interesting, when you're asking this question, so many people come from a different background and that that then leads into technology. I'm definitely someone who, who saw the opportunities door opening at some point. I had a background in? business and finance not so not in technology.

But in my first role actually I was working in strategy consulting, and in that period, it was in the early 2000s, the telco boom in Europe, and we were building organizations from scratch, so I was there designing process and business cases, etc.

But what I loved was partnering with the technology team on how to implement those business. And it had a very concrete nature to it, which I really, really enjoyed. So during that one of those programs, I decided to join the technology team and learn from there.

And my second role was in a large Fortune 500, US organization, manufacturing organization. And I really saw it was still almost accidental at that time, where I was just following the trail.

But in this one of my early roles, I was serving a leadership role in a to a large operating model program, where across Europe across 12 different countries, we are rethinking again, how the group was operating the process, but the culture as well.

And that was another really fascinating insights of the power of technology not only as an enabler, as I'd seen in previous role, but as bringing bringing people together.

I think quite what kept me really into it after that was a series of you know, world accelerating and all of a sudden, we had fantastic connection everywhere, we had devices that were allowing us to do much more sophisticated things and transform our business.

And career wise at that time I was for this US manufacturing at a regional 娇色导航role in that region or a CTO role looking after Asia Pacific. And I decided to join Dulux Group,? as their Group 娇色导航as well.

So DuluxGroup, really home of a lot of well known and loved Australian brands, fantastic culture, fantastic product, but really fantastic sales and marketing team as well. How do you brand the product had to reach out to customer and consumer.

And at the time, it was really analog, very analog, sophisticated, but analog approach. So it was my first experience into leading fully into the customer technology and digital using the customer technology, which was a fantastic experience, again, because it was grounded into the amazing DuluxGroup culture.

But because as well, it coincided at some point with the COVID crisis where people were stuck at home.

And for us the ability to understand needs, and have the right data have the right ecommerce in place, but as well provided online service to help people run their own, you know, home repair and repaint. And it was very powerful.

So not only a lot of new technology for me, but it was a new type of impact on the community, which I loved. And actually, that drove me to my current role with with PEXA.

And that was more driven over what's next for me as a technology leader now leading to a technology organization. That's a bit of that that was a bit of my ambition here.

But I wanted something as well that had this component of community impact and innovation for good and innovate for good is one of PEXA's key values. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

So we'd love to hear more about PEXA. So you've been Group CTO there since 2022. So tell us a bit more about the organization. I guess. You know, you mentioned there some of its its values.

So tell us more about its purpose and what you and the team look after there. ? Eglantine Etiemble?

Yeah, so PEXA is a really interesting organization, not necessarily well known by the public because it's a b2b business. We're working with banking, convenyancers or government. But it's a company that has been really professionalizing the property transaction markets in Australia.

So pretty much 10 to 14 years ago, I think based on a COAG (Council of Australia Government) initiative, PEXA was born to solve the problem of how do you digitalize the conveyancing. So how you transfer property title, with, with settlements, financial settlement at the center, etc.

It sounds reasonably simple. But interestingly, it has a lot of complexity. And it's a problem that hadn't been solved anywhere in the world. So that's a problem that we've been solving at PEXA.

And we have now more than 90% of any property transaction settled on our platform in 2024. So the exciting things are we are now growing this value proposition in EU data products but as well in international jurisdiction in UK for instance.

So while it is an ASX listed organisation, it is still reasonably small with we are 1200 across Australia and UK right now.

Technology is probably a bit more than a third of that a bit more than 400 people and we are looking after how different platform products but we're looking after as well security and workplace technology. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

So you touched on it there that you now reach 90% of property transactions. That's a huge achievement. And but can you tell us a bit more about that digitization journey and you know, some of the key achievements that you and the team have made? ? Eglantine Etiemble?

Yes, yes, that's it's been a it's been such a fantastic journey, and more than happy to talk about that.

So again, the ambition of the Australian Government was to digitize this complex process across Australia, one single solution, we are almost there we have now we have six trades jurisdiction out of eight. And as I was saying more than 90% transaction that will be transacting through PEXA.

We probably have been supporting over 3 trillion of Australian Dollar transaction across our platform, 16 million of settlement of property in Australia. So pretty, pretty big impact on on the market. And that is really translating into very different experience for users of our platform.

We can have come across already a diversity of people who are gonna leverage our tool, and they don't have to come physically into Land Registry to settle, but they can do this from home.

So that allows, again, a lot of people to to continue to work with our platform. In terms of digitalization as well, we've been doing a lot of work on data.

So one of the diversification angle, we're having these new products that are so far as sophistication and regulation, management around data was critical. So it's really something that we've been improving dramatically over the past couple of years.

Again, in terms of the PEXA digitization journey, as I was saying, we are now penetrating the UK market, which is probably the market that has the worst property transaction experience in the well, one of the world.

So really fascinating to see the impact we're starting to have right now on the remortgage process, the refinancing process, but very soon on the on the settlement transaction process as well. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

So it sounds like you weren't quite hand in glove with the business there. So how do you ensure those IT initiatives that they align with those overall strategic goals and the mission of PEXA? ? Eglantine Etiemble?

One of the trends, we have just really wanted to recognize this, it's still a reasonably small organization, I've had experience with much larger organization where it's of course a little bit, you need to rely more on processes.

The first thing is the executive team is working very, very closely. We're spending a lot of time together. And we are working very closely on assessing, what are the market opportunities and challenges ahead of us today, tomorrow in five years? How do we need to think about it.

So consequently, our strategy is really born collectively, I'm not building the pieces together and trying to weave them back together, we're building our strategy together, we're building the set of strategic initiatives that are going to support it together.

But when implemented, as well, in the last year, a quite sophisticated prioritization ongoing process throughout the year that allows us to be more agile in how we respond to market changes.

And that process gets across the whole organization or any initiative of going to the funnel, and we will be reviewing it every month with the CEO of Australia, UK, the head of the different functions, and we will be able to readjust what we are doing.

So in the end, again, instantaneousness 99%, of what we're doing is technology initiatives. So the portfolio is a Tech Tech portfolio, but it's a group portfolio. It's something that we keep alive and keep refreshing together. So that keeps us very honest.

And that drives a lot of transparency as well, impossible, what we want to do, but what are we actually doing and how we are performing against it. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

So what's your approach then, when it comes to innovation within the technology team?

I mean, how are you looking at implementing new technologies, and then there's a lot of noise around AI at the moment, but also other things that have emerged in the last decade or so like IOT and automation? What's your approach there? ? Eglantine Etiemble?

So, again, imagine we are a tech business in a property market so for us innovation is absolutely critical, fierce competition and a very, very fast moving industry.

So the ability for us to, to understand how technology can change the game is critical, and innovate for good is, as I was saying one of our core values, it's really embedded in our reward mechanism or evaluation system.

So everybody knows what they expected to do in that space. And I think it's an important foundation. The other thing is that I want to talk about is, we have a very balanced approach when it comes to innovation.

As you can imagine, the exchange part of our business, the exchange platform that our business is regulated, and is actually now critical infrastructure of Australia.

So typically, we're trying to rebuild a lot of attention to where we innovate, or are the area where we do not have confidential data, whether or not this area regulated, etc.

So when we think about our pilots, and innovation grounds, first of all, we are looking at the non-regulated, less risk, risky area of our business. In third parties, again, we're taking a very holistic approach.

So when we're thinking about innovation, that was true for Cloud, that's really true for AI right now, we're not thinking about what it's like that we need to bring in thinking about what it's like to be the impact on the market, the mirror are not here, either through security from work risk framework, and I need to put in place.

How do I manage training or manage expectation?

So if you're thinking, now five or six years ago, when we were one of the first companies in Australia to move into the cloud, in partnership with AWS, this is really not only about the cloud migration, it's about ongoing training and certification. It's about reskilling etc.

We're taking a very holistic approach with AI, right. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

So maybe more relevant to your previous roles, but how do you balance that then when, you know, there's cutting edge technology coming in, but you also have to maintain a lot of legacy systems legacy infrastructure, what's been your approach, and maybe in previous roles, not so much in this because you are more at the forefront of it?

But how do you balance that need for maintaining those existing systems with looking at what's coming down the road? ? Eglantine Etiemble?

Acutally you know what, it's still it's still relevant at this speed of innovation. It's still relevant for PEXA today, the platform that we are operating on right now was kicked off 12 years ago, so 13 years ago.

So again, it's not an it's technology that was built for robustness, not for modularity and integration. But definitely a challenge for us right now. The approach we are taking is, it was the start of the platform with our API Heritage API as well.

We're not trying to rebuild it all, what we are trying to do is when we are building something new, we are building it for reuse.

So we have an array of platform that we are working in, when we are looking at a payment system or an identification system, we're making sure that it's going to be reused in the array of companies that we have in our in particular different platform we're having so somehow, we don't have to rebuild all of this from scratch, we're just making sure that we're taking a modular approach and this approach is reusable across our organization.

So at the end of it innovation drives as well, the lift up of the rest of our of our business, but it's a it's a very, very challenging balance or regulation, innovation, cost effectiveness or managing this whole platform.

Again, I think a good prioritization process is really helpful with that, because it helps us having a portfolio that is balanced, we have all the tension of the company in this prioritization process that allows us to make sure that we we are very balanced in our initiatives.

? Cathy O'Sullivan?

So you also deal with a lot of sensitive data, you know, payments, identity, what's your approach them when it comes to cyber security and ensuring that that very sensitive data is kept private and secure? ? Eglantine Etiemble?

Yeah, so definitely, data privacy, cybersecurity, and resilience is the area in which we are never compromising, I was talking about 90% of Australian transactions, but you need to understand the consequence of that a lot of Land Registry now do not have a physical process of paper based process anymore.

So if tomorrow we are down, we just cannot transact property in Australia, hence the fact that we are a critical infrastructure.

So for us, the baseline is making sure that we are up to all the industry standards up to ISO27001 we're just making sure that we are relentlessly looking at what's the best in class? What are the standards we can adhere to? And that's our starting position.

We're making sure as well that we are partnering with the best in class in different areas, whether it's in technology or in into services.

Again, it's a small organization but anybody even large organization today, you need to be partnering with people who are leading edge or bleeding edge into their different areas, especially with the rise of AI and quantum computing.

I think what I love particularly with the way we're approaching it at PEXA is we have three layers, we have the technology layer, which I was describing, but we have the group layer, which is culture and processes. How do we respond to a cyber incident?

What's the crisis management? And how is the exec team ready? How do we collectively own a cyber resilience, structure, culture as well. But we are looking after the ecosystem as well.

So we are partnering with the banks, Land Registry, the governments to run some some tests and crisis test that we as well to work on process and protocol. And industry standards are a technology resilience across all of us.

So if one party in the ecosystem is failing, how can the other pick it up, which I think is quite innovative, and definitely important. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

So what do you look for then when you are engaging with technology partners? What does a good partnership look like to you and the team at PEXA? ? Eglantine Etiemble? Yeah.

So how do we select? First of all, the question for me is always how do we know that we need to partner with someone and it's something that is critical for us, but it's not our core capability, cyber being a fabulous example of one.

We will never be the best of cyber, and we shouldn't be. So really identifying what are those pockets of things that are really, really important. And and we are not going to be the best at doing this.

From there, what I what's important as well, it's it's a, it's a very value driven organization. So we need to ensure that on the long run the value and the roadmaps are alive.

But when we're looking at that, we definitely look at things that we're aspiring to look like or to be like. So if I think about AWS are our really strong partners, aspiring and driving our cloud management, but our resilience management as well.

And you know, they're the best that you could in that area. Similarly, we've been doing a lot of work with Thoughtworks, and their ways of working out, always evolving, and always cutting edge.

So when we're thinking about our operating model, we're reusing a lot of the work that we've seen them doing. So we work with people, again, who we really aspire to be like and who are not afraid to challenge us.

So typically, another fantastic partner for us at the moment Snowflake is really pushing our thinking into data sharing that I use it and that data product and AI in data, so really getting the organization that can help us grow. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

And then when it comes to your own team, then you know, how are you making sure that you are creating that environment that really makes your people feel like they're growing and thriving at work? ? Eglantine Etiemble?

So it's something that we all talk about, but that I think we're doing really well at PEXA right now is this connection to purpose and to strategy. So our purpose, the tech side is connecting people to places.

And again, we've done tremendous progress in that space in Australia now in UK. So really getting the team into what does that really mean for customers? What is what is the impact that you're really having on the markets, what is the impact when things are down.

So really getting very close to that purpose and keeping on making sure that we keep it aligned, but very close to the strategy as well. So understanding how your work is contributing to the group scorecard and the group impact.

So this is something that we are talking about every month, every week in the different team, we're cascading that visibility. Self actualization is a big one.

So we've been investing a lot in in career pathways and self actualisation as well, but with our partners as well to make sure that our team continues to learn and evolve.

Diversity and Inclusion, since very, very basic information one, but again, making sure that independently from your background and from your, from who you are, we can get the best out of you and you can feel you can be yourself in the organization.

I think people dramatically underestimate the impact that you cause when you don't have an inclusive organization.

I think the last one for my team, which I personally really enjoy as well., e'd have to work with moonshots a stretch goal and playing that with, what would it mean if we were if we're able to do this?

So instead of saying how can we improve this incrementally, we look back at things and say, What if PEXA could do this? And what would it take? And I think working on those moonshots is always you know, very, very fulfilling. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

Indeed, and look, you mentioned there the importance of diversity in any organization. What do you think can be done to get more people from different backgrounds to consider IT as a career?

Are there any kind of practical things that can be done to open up the doors to people who may not have considered it previously? ? Eglantine Etiemble?

Yeah, so yeah, absolutely. So I look at first of all, some some of the hygiene factor but then the EVP, the employee value proposition, that we're running the big size, flexible first organization.

So just making sure that again, people with different types of backgrounds, we know that particularly women, if we talk about gender diversity are doing two to 10 times more unpaid work in the community.

So what does that mean is we have less flexibility as women, so making sure that you have a lot of flexibility in your workforce, for instance, is the foundation. So making sure that those hygiene factors are there.

What I'm particularly impressed with is getting getting the awareness getting the spark very early. So going to schools, and making sure that we are having a lot of conversations.

You have programs like Go Girl, go for IT, that goes to schools to bring more girls into technology and shaping in year nine or 10. You know, how does that look like? So just getting this out there early, I think is important.

I think it's important to to invest in reskilling. We have today a lot of people who have fantastic background outside of technology and it's incredibly rich to bring that in. But we have to have those pathways that are not necessarily university and three year degrees.

So for instance, we are partnering with Holberton School right now. And we're taking two waves of graduates a year and we get people who are in healthcare, in teaching, and the richness they bring to the equation is fantastic. ? Cathy O'Sullivan? Yeah, absolutely.

All that life that they bring and different perspectives, I'm sure add so much. And so then what advice would you give to someone who was aspiring to be a CIO? ? Eglantine Etiemble?

Yeah, I think technology is absolutely critical. You need to know your area, but you need to get to know your business in detail.

To see to dive, spend time with the Customer Center, spend time on the store, in the aisle, make sure that you need to deep dive into your business and that you understand the potential and the opportunity, the pain point, the real lived realities of the employee there, I think it's always a competitive advantage in technology to do that.

I'd say as well don't always ask for permission, sometimes when you want - and I shouldn't say too loud, again, in a regulated organization - but there are always pockets of innovation.

And you can always test things, it's much easier to demonstrate the value of something if you've been able to make it happen in real life. An inclusive team is critical; too often we have teams that are very, very similar in IT.

And the problem with that is you have a team that doesn't fully understand all aspects of the business cannot relate to different aspects of of your team is that if, as a team leader, you have a team that is able to do that, and you can demonstrate that it's really going to reflect very positively on your potential as a as a broader leader.

And I would say, you need to have internal and external sponsors to build your brand. You need to have people who will you you're going to go and share really what the what was the impact of the work you're doing.

And again, internally and externally, so that those champions can help you when they're going to want to help you when the opportunity arises. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

And finally, I know you've worked on an awful lot of things in the last couple of years at PEXA. But do you have any other exciting initiatives in the pipeline? What's important to you in the months ahead? ? Eglantine Etiemble?

So probably one of my favorites is the work we're doing in the UK. We're continuing to accelerate the build of the platform over there.

And we've been focusing on one big value proposition but very soon we'll be tacking the biggest value proposition to the transaction exchange in the UK which will be there in 2025. So that's going to be very, very exciting for the market over there.

And for us and really the demonstration over the things we have been working on. There is a really interesting piece of work that is starting with AI and we are looking at at scale AI and empowered employees.

What we're seeing right now on the market is that there's already a big distinction between employees that can master AI and some others who cannot and they're accessible to the job market.

So I want to make sure that our our team is self actualizing but we want to make sure that they're empowered to drive the array of initiatives that we are up seeing potentially across the across the group.

And finally I know that sounds a bit less sexy but for me cyber resilience is always very exciting. We are looking at how can we recover always faster in a simpler way and making sure that we are keeping this value proposition that we are in today.

Today we have 100% uptime in this platform. So just keep maintaining that and thinking of innovative solutions to keep it safe and secure is quite exciting. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

Well we wish you the best with the months ahead and look forward to seeing the fruits of your labour, especially the impact of it on the property market in the UK. Eglantine Etiemble, Group CTO at PEXA thank you so much for your time today. ? Eglantine Etiemble?

Thanks a lot, Cathy