娇色导航

Cathy O'Sullivan?

Welcome to 娇色导航Leadership Live New Zealand. I'm Cathy O'Sullivan, Editorial Director in ANZ for Foundry, and on today's episode I'm delighted to be joined by Avinash de Silva, who is Head of Technology at Alvarium. Kia ora, Avi. Welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today?

? Avinash de Silva? Doing good.

Thank you. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

Great, great and great to chat to you again. I think the last time we caught up was that the CIO50 event in Auckland last year. So, look, tell us a bit about your career to date. How did you get started in IT?

And what have been some of your career milestones to date? ? Avinash de Silva?

Yeah, I think my start in IT was a bit of an unusual one.

I went through a whole process of studying at university, thinking that I was going to be a really cool, tooled up mechanical engineer, joined the workforce, as a mechanical engineer, decided that it wasn't really the profression for me.

I then pivoted into supply chain, and rapidly realized how much or how many businesses around New Zealand were just running entire purchasing portfolios and doing these really complicated things in Excel.

And it sort of drove an almost existential question for me around 'Is there a better way to do this?' 'How do we actually get some of these things automated?' And how do we improve the quality of life and the work that people like myself at that time were doing.

And then I went through and eventually found technology.? I didn't pivot into it easily, it was quite a long and drawn out process. I interviewed at all sorts of places. I mean, you name the company, I've probably interviewed there, Workday, SAP, Microsoft, Oracle.

I've done an interview cycles of pretty much all of these all these big places.

I made my lucky break at Datacom, actually, so I joined the team there as a Dynamics 365 implementations consultant.? And since that point, I've had a pretty good series of highlights, starting at Datacom, where I helped Datacom and Microsoft launch a new product into the market, which is a really cool process to go through, you know, I was speaking in front of really big crowds.

And I even did a full on HR event that had Nigel Latta as a headline speaker, and it was sort of my event and, you know, the.com team really got behind me and, and recipt delivered this really cool sort of breakfast series, which was awesome.

And from that point, a few more highlights I moved on then from being a, you know, implementations consultant, being really on the tools and gradually started getting a bit more of the tools and getting a bit more into leadership.? I was the most recently, I suppose, a couple of roles ago, I was the head of technology and platforms at a company called FreshDirect, which is one of New Zealand's largest fresh fruit and produce distribution firms.

And that was amazing, it was a really dynamic, high paced environment, you know, we were transacting millions of transactions a year.

And it sort of taught me about the economies of scale, and how you know, even saving 30 seconds in one area can lead to these these huge changes.

And it's sort of where I really cut my teeth on looking at processes on an enterprise scale.? Currently, I work as the head of technology at Alvarium, which is a private wealth management firm.

And we deal with a lot of high net worth clients, and help them access investment opportunities and advice that they would not have otherwise had access to. We also do a range of things around property development, really big construction projects, and all that sort of stuff.

So it's really cool to see these sort of different facets of the financial world being played out just in front of you. We also have a another brand under our business called Pathfinder, which is sort of sits independently but it's still owned by us.

And Pathfinder is New Zealand's leading ethical investment company.

So you know, they were the ones who pioneered the way around reporting, how much of your KiwiSaver is invested in weapons, arms, and, you know, oil and all sorts of things that Kiwis didn't really know that their money was being tied up in.

And that was started about 10 years ago. And they're still the pioneers of this practice to date. And, you know, we've got a wall of accolades in in one of the rooms that just keeps growing and growing.

And now we need to find a new wall to put all our trophies on as well. So it's really yeah, been a great journey so far. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

Yeah, it sounds absolutely fascinating. And yeah, amazing. Actually, one out Alvarium has been doing especially in that Pathfinder space. So look, you've given us there as a bit of a brief overview of the organization.

So can you tell us a bit more about what you and your team look after at Alvarium? ? Avinash de Silva?

So we're sort of fully in charge of everything to do with technology and and that kind of starts really at the base levels from how you interact with your devices and how those devices are set up.

And you know, few more mundane things like printers and all that sort of stuff, managing all those vendors. And then it goes on into a little bit more of the business applications layer, we manage CRM systems, middleware, integration platforms.

And then we step up into the governance layer as well. And we do, you know, set technology strategy, think about how things like AI are going to impact our business, and how do we stay ahead of those curves.

Also looking at things from a heavy regulatory and compliance perspective, because Alvarium is a sort of financial services company and the FMA is, you know, very involved with how we run our business and how we stay ahead of, you know, their regulatory requirements, I suppose.

So there's a huge cybersecurity aspect and compliance and risk management aspect to what we do as well. So it's a very broad and multifaceted I guess, fun technology function at Alvarium.

And we've got a lot of different vendors that pitch in as well from time to time to help us out. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

So then tell us a bit more at bat, your digitalization journey at Alvarium, what are some, I guess the key things that you and the team have achieved in the last few years ? Avinash de Silva?

It's really a great privilege to work at Alvarium at this very critical juncture of of where we are as a business and how we're developing. When I came on board, we were actually still part of a global wealth management business, and we split ourselves off.

So I've kind of been responsible for setting things up straight from scratch. So you know, decoupling our environments, migrating everything, all our users, our domains, all that sort of stuff from a previous global parent in the UK.

And just setting everything up from scratch here in New Zealand, rationalizing technology sunsetting, a whole bunch of infrastructure that we didn't need.

decommissioning servers, putting things into the cloud, moving towards, you know, when we're still in this journey, moving towards a bit more of an automated process of sort of commissioning and setting up devices with Windows Intune, and autopilot.

And then through to implementing new systems and processes as well, like, CRM systems, you know, we did a sort of not a big dynamics, CRM project, but a fairly chunky one last year, and we're sort of iterating and moving on that this year as well.

Yeah, so that's a few snapshots, I also helped deliver sort of a full on cybersecurity framework and sort of risk management toolkit that we use internally in the business as well. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

So it sounds like a lot of change involved in that time when you were decoupling from the international business. So what were some of the biggest challenges during that time? And how did you overcome them? ? Avinash de Silva?

Yeah, I think, for me, the biggest challenge was the fact that we were dealing with a, it was just the the geography and the relative isolation of New Zealand was, was one of the biggest things, you know, we were dealing with a IT team that was primarily in the UK, but also had sort of team members in the US.

And we were using an outsource vendor in New Zealand, and trying to coordinate all these moving pieces, you know, you send an email, during your workday in New Zealand and might get to the American teams later in the day, or the UK team might pick it up and sort of come back to you.

So just managing that that disparate set of geographies was really was quite hard. And there was you know, I've worked in multinational companies before, but this was definitely taking that to a whole new level.

And the way I kind of got around that was just making sure that I was really clear and what I was communicating with, really clear on what the asks were and what the backlog was.

So just making sure that every email, I send I iterate or reiterate that, 'hey, we need this information', or we 'need this to get signed off'. 'These things are still pending, what say you'. And eventually we sort of got through that.

It wasn't perfect,? it never is but I found that as long as you lead with a bit of over communication, like you don't want to spam people with a whole bunch of emails, but as long as you were really descriptive as to what you want it, it was generally more successful than not, and I kind of improved on that process as I went as well.

? Cathy O'Sullivan?

So then, you know, now Alvarium stands on its own two feet in New Zealand. So what's your approach, then Avi, when it comes to aligning that technology strategy with that overall business strategy? ? Avinash de Silva?

It's it's quite an interesting process, because we're sort of at a conflux of or a confluence of, you know, where technology strategy and business strategy are kind of overlapping. Like before It was always the technologies.

You know, my approach was always that technology strategy would support the business strategy. And we would use technology to help achieve these outcomes.

But now you're sort of almost thinking about it in the sense that, how can you use technology to drive a key strategic advantage in the market?

And how does that technology then take the front sort of seat, and you're not merely just a passenger in that in that journey?

So right now, it's, it's a bit of both, we're doing a lot of thinking around what the future could look like, and what technology what technology we could use to really give us a competitive edge.

But also, at the same time, we're looking at those cold hard business metrics, we need to grow by a business by X amount, or we need to bring in this many more customers, or we need to keep ourselves secure and compliant.

Or we need to deliver a better customer experience. And then I derive a bulk of the technology strategy still off those metrics, and align projects to support those, those different areas of the business. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

And of course, not a day goes by themes with that AI coming into the conversation. So and you know, what, what's your thoughts on I AI And Gen AI?

It's probably the area that there's most buzz about in the past couple of years, is this something that you're actively looking at for your organization? ? Avinash de Silva?

So loosely, I have a lot of thoughts about AI and Gen AI, it, it feels like every conference, every event, every blog, I read seems to be focused around AI.

And it's definitely becoming one of those terms that's almost synonymous with, with technology, which actually don't mind, because, you know, historically, they were much more boring things to be synonymous with, like data centers, and all this sort of stuff.

So in that sense of, I'm quite enjoying that process, I think what we're grappling with is that some of these tools, some of these Gen AI tools are a bit more like a black box, you sort of you buy them off the shelf, they give you a Data Partition, you know, you get that sort of privacy, but you put information in and you get information out, but you're not really aware of that process.

And you can't really I guess we can't effect it in the way that we would like to to get some really precise sort of outputs out of it.

So I think for us, it's it's more of a wait and see at the moment, we are playing around with a few different things. But we haven't sort of committed to a wholesale AI process.

Another key thing that we're doing is just educating staff around what is safe and ethical AI us you know, we have a lot of information in our business, we don't want that information being disseminated even in a sophisticated way through an AI model somewhere else.

So just making sure that our staff are with us on that journey. I keep them updated as to what it can and what it can't do.

And then trying to think of how we can harness it better, you know, sink of a little bit more effort and investment into creating a really useful set of AI tools for ourselves. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

Yeah, those guardrails are so important, aren't they? A lot of CIOs are spending time on, on educating the workforce on what's okay to put in ChatGPT and what you should definitely not be putting in there. Is there any other emerging tech that you're excited about?

? Avinash de Silva?

I think one of the main things that I'm really excited about, and I'm not entirely sure where the regulatory stance on this is, and where we are in New Zealand's journey towards this, but open banking, something that I've been really fascinated about, and been thinking about for quite a long time, like even before sort of working in the financial services industry, I could see it sort of value to the general New Zealand consumer.

And I think I'd like to see that happen within the next, you know, five years, it might take longer than that with New Zealand, typically a little bit slower on our feet when it comes to some of this sort of financial innovation, but I'm really excited about the prospect of being able to surface insights and information to our customers in new and exciting ways.

And, and having them actually get a fuller picture of their financial positions. And you know, because that knowledge really is is crucial when when you're thinking about things like your retirement to buying a house.

Just being able to see all that information in one place is quite valuable, but also being able to access specialist services from companies like AlvariumPathfinder, and still, you know, you get that service and you get that convenience.

I think that's a really that's going to be a really, really key shift in how New Zealand sort of investors and just the general citizen of New Zealand interacts with their financial services and their bank accounts. So I'm quite excited for them. ? Cathy O'Sullivan? Yeah, fascinating.

I think there is Yeah, work in that space already around what what we need to do from a regulatory point of view to enable some of that open open banking.

So look, Avi, where do you go for you know, how do you keep up to date then with technology trends, future predictions, emerging tech? How do you keep up to date with all of that? ? Avinash de Silva?

I take a little bit of a multimodal approach to this. And this is sort of something I do with my direct reports, as well as we sort of look at the sum total of what we're trying to achieve and where the skills gaps are.

And then we leverage different mechanisms to try fill in those gaps.

You know, you start at the formal education space, I've done a couple of last year, for example, I did a couple of information governance and privacy law courses at the University of Auckland, which I did quite well in surprisingly, so that was good, working full time.

And studying master's degree is never easy. And then you sort of go from there into, you know, maybe a bit more of the mass online course type, edX, or, you know, AWS certification type education. So I use a little bit of that as well.

And then I go to events that I put on forums, conferences.

And, you know, like, I do understand that a lot of those conferences are vendor -led, but it's very useful to understand where vendors are innovating and what products and services they bring into the market, because they have done the work, they know that there's a gap there.

So then, what I like to do is go along to those conferences, see what's being offered and think, do I need that? Or am I going to need that. And it's quite educational for me in that sense, as well.

So I tried to mix a bit of you know, what's coming in on what's already happened in with my professional development.

And of course, I read 娇色导航magazine, all the newsletters that come out, I click through the articles, a couple of ones that I've saved and sort of refer back to quite quite heavily. So it's been good. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

Great, great to hear. And look, you know, speaking of vendors and technology service providers more generally, what do you look for when you're choosing a partner? What does a good technology partnership look like from your perspective? ? Avinash de Silva?

Yes, for myself, and I guess, a large portion of SMBs in New Zealand are good technology partner is a partner that is constantly innovating, if they're coming to me with suggestions, if they're doing things that are, you know, well in advance of anything that I could even dream of achieving right now.

That's a, that's a mark of a really good vendor, for me.

Also, things like they take their security seriously, they've got a SOC2 certification, or they are ISO 27001, accredited, things like that.? But I really want to go back to that point around, I want my vendors to challenge me, I want them to be the thought leaders in their specific areas, I can't be everywhere at once, and you can't hire 100% of the skill set that any company needs.

In New Zealand, I mean, you might if you were an Air New Zealand, or BNZ, or something, you know, you could have all that skill set in house, but for us to be experts in data and analytics, and cybersecurity and, you know, API's and also cloud engineering, it's impossible, you can't you can't hire all these people and give them enough work to keep them occupied.

So yeah, that's sort of what I look for. It's just a culture of innovation. And then hopefully, that culture infects a little bit of our culture. And you know, we all sort of buzz and kind of feed off each other.

Because typically, that's been where the the best service does. A lot of those businesses are very driven towards reducing customer friction and reducing the amount of times you, you have issues and projects fall over, because it's just good business sense as well. So it's a win for them.

It's a weapon for me, and I tried to really actively seek out partners like that. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

Well said, so switching gears a bit, Avi, how would you describe your leadership style? ? Avinash de Silva?

Um, I think my leadership style is something that is has evolved over the years. It's right now, I'd say it's quite, it's quite flexible.

I have evolved into a slightly slightly more sort of regulatory led and risk focused leadership style at the moment because that sort of fits really well with with our industry and what we're doing.

So looking at risks, how to get in front of them, how to get around them, is sort of where I like to lead, but I also like to lead from the front I like to sort of hold myself to extremely high standard and then hold the the vendors and the people around me to that standard as well.

But I'm also, you know, just a consummate mentor and coach, like I just love coaching people. I love being a really good mentor, helping develop people and bring them bring them up with me as well.

So one of the people that I used to report to he said he only ever hired people, he only ever hired staff that he could foresee himself reporting to one day and that's something that I've carried forward with me as well.

So if I look at someone across an interview room, and I think, wow, this person is amazing, like, they could be my boss one day, if given the right resources and given the right tools. I'm all for that.

So I guess yeah, I'm a bit of an enabler in that sense. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

So, you know, we're all a work in progress. And is there anything, you know, you mentioned that your leadership style has evolved? So are there any I guess, mistakes or lessons you've learned along the way that have really shaped you as a leader? ? Avinash de Silva?

I think, for me, one of the things that I really grappled with, when I was first starting out at technology, and this is because partially because I was in such a high sort of stakes project environment, you know, you running big ERP projects, which is almost like conducting open heart surgery on on a on a business, right, you're ripping up the guts of the accounting system, the supply chain system, how they get money, how they pay money.

And for me, the biggest lesson I had to learn there was just, you know, it's better to communicate the risks and to communicate something that could go wrong, well, in advance of it actually going wrong, then sort of sitting on it and thinking, Oh, this could be okay.

And it does take a lot of courage as a young sort of technologist to learn how to do that. But it has paid off in so many different ways, like you just the amount of trust that you build, with the people around you.

And the you know, now the internal leadership team, the exec the board, when they know that, hey Avi has got a handle on it. He understands what the risks are, and he's communicated those risks with us.

So we're all informed on this journey, as opposed to me going on, I should be fine. And then, you know, five days later, having something completely blow up in my face. I think that that process, that lesson has been quite, quite relevant for me.

And it's really helped in my career. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

And you mentioned earlier that golden bit of advice that you had around hiring people and looking for people that, you know, one day, you'd hope you were reporting to them. Is there any other career advice that you've been given along the way that has really served you?

? Avinash de Silva? Yeah, absolutely.

I think, again, this is sort of going back to the same manager, actually. And I was very lucky to have him at the start of my career.

And one of the things that he he sort of said was, you know, you've got to, you've got to be your own personal advocate, no one else is going to sit there and advocate for you.

They're not going to do a significant piece of internal advocacy around, wow, he gets to work, you know, and he puts in all the hard yards, and he does all these things, they'll see some snippets of what you've done.

But you've got to be that that internal advocate for yourself, you've got to make sure that if you've done something, you in a very humble way, you call out the successes, and you sort of you help, you know, the rest of the business feel like it's their success as well.

And that's been quite useful for me, because often, technology sits by itself. In some more traditional businesses, and when I've been in those roles, I could be doing a whole lot of great stuff, and no one else would be seeing it.

But if I say, Hey, we've delivered this new, you know, like, zero virtual desktop environment, it's going to really speed up the business, you guys are gonna be able to do all these great things with it.

And we've done this project under budget, and it's it's gone really well, then people get excited about it as well. And they start seeing me in a better light. Whereas otherwise, they might say, they might think, 'Oh, well, oh, he's changed something again.

Oh, my gosh, look at all this stuff. Now we've got to learn this whole new environment, I've got to log in a different way and relearn how I interact with my workplace. ' So yeah, that subtle reframing has been quite good for me. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

Yeah, great to hear and just underlines, again, the importance that you highlighted earlier, around over communicating and making sure people actually know what's what's going on. When it comes to what you're doing in the technology team. Look, it's hard to believethat we're nearly halfway through 2024.

So what's important to you for the months ahead, are there any other exciting initiatives in the pipeline? ? Avinash de Silva?

I think, for me, what's really exciting, and what's quite important is that, you know, this is this is a whole new financial year for us. And there's a whole sort of realm of raft of possibilities.

And it's really exciting to have have spent a significant amount of time in the business and the iterating on things that you've done last year, like it's, it's not often that you get to sort of just keep building and improving on the work you've done.

So we're doing a whole bunch of things, really simple things around cybersecurity, tidying a few things up, bringing our staff along on the journey as well, making sure they're better trained and equipped to handle the stresses and the, the crazy amount of AI driven spam that's heading their way.

But also in slight, slightly adjacent to work perspective, there's a lot of initiatives and a lot of volunteering work that I'm very excited about being able to continue. I'm a mentor at the King's Trust and I work with young entrepreneurs who are trying to start up tech businesses.

So I'm really excited to see how some of these businesses are going and where they're going to get to.

So that's, that's something that I'm quite keen to see because the one thing that I take away from mentoring young people is that they are, you know, they're 100% capable and able of doing anything that's put in front of them.

You just got to give them the right support, and they can get there and yeah, it's always inspiring. So it's always really cool to see and proceed, I suppose and see what they get to. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

And good on you for giving them that support. Avinash de Silva, Head of Technology at Alvarium, thank you so much for your time today. ? Avinash de Silva? You're welcome, Cathy.