Digital Debrief: Recent Episodes
Ben Rose, Mitchell Pham, NZME
Welcome to the Digital Debrief, the podcast where you’ll hear from New Zealand business leaders who have implemented transformational digital initiatives. Hear what they did, why and how they did it and learn what they’d do differently next time. With the rate of change increasing and expectations growing, today’s conversation will give you an insight into how you might start to think about this for your business. Produced with NZME and brought to you by CodeHQ – make software, not excuses.
Welcome to another episode of the Digital Debrief. In this episode we speak to founders of Winely, Abbe (Chief Product Officer) and Jacob (CEO). Winely is an Exocule company and AI-powered precision fermentation solution that optimizes tradition while deepening the connection between the wine and winemaker through real-time, deep learning-based data collection and analysis. They are passionate in the belief that biology can solve some of the world’s biggest problems. Jacob confidently leads the vision and strategy for Exocule’s technology, thereby making scale possible for alternative-protein production. Through Winely's deep tech and proprietary AI-powered physical sensors, Jacob, Abbe and the team are helping winemakers and alternative food manufacturers gain real-time insights into the state of their vintages (or batches), eliminate dangerous and time-consuming manual sampling, and scale their production in an eco-friendly way while also saving them time, labour, money, waste, and many unnecessary interventions.
Welcome to another episode of the Digital Debrief. I’m your host Ben Rose, and today we’re speaking to Carolyn Luey, Chief Digital and Publishing Officer at NZME. Carolyn is a strategic business leader, that brings a depth of experience and a strong track record built over 10 years leading large marketing, sales and operational teams in the telecommunications, technology and media industries. Prior to NZME, Carolyn worked at Vodafone and also MYOB. She is a passionate driver of change particularly where she sees opportunity to drive benefits for customers and leverage the best of digital to create amazing customer experiences. She is a collaborative leader who loves to bring together diverse teams to deliver positive change and turn strategy into brilliant execution and commercial results.
In this episode we speak to our very own co-founder, Mitchell Pham. Mitchell is a serial entrepreneur, senior executive, board director and strategic advisor with expertise in digital transformation, new innovation and technology ventures.
In this episode we speak to Luke Campbell, Co-Founder of VXT. Luke Campbell & Lucy Turner founded Vxt in 2018 at Uni after identifying a problem that most people can relate to, that voicemail sucks. They released an application used by tens of thousands of people globally to help manage voicemail and have grown the business from there. Vxt is a smart communications platform that leverages rich communication data to automate the work no one wants to do; admin. Since launching in March, Vxt has grown to serve customers all around the world who make thousands of calls every week, connecting to CRMs and record-keeping systems so that notes, time, and other details from calls can be recorded automatically, which helps firms grow revenue and mitigate risk.
Zeald was formed in 2001 by three young guys from the small New Zealand town of Mangawhai Heads brother David and Brent Kelly and their cousin Hamish Bradick. Now, Zeald is the largest SME website design and digital transformation agency in New Zealand and has clients throughout both New Zealand and Australia. Jarra established and leads Zeald’s commercial agency in Tauranga and was a key part of the team, together with co-founder David Kelly, that developed Zeald's social impact initiative, GEM (the Get Ecommerce Movement). GEM is an ecommerce-driven digital transformation initiative aimed at helping SMEs get started on their digital journey and trading online, which they launched in NZ in March last year in response to Covid's impact on SME businesses. The technology has since grown with a number of developments and partnerships established, as a result. Jarra is now spearheading the rollout of GEM in Fiji, and is part of the architecture team that developed the Digital Cluster Initiative, a partnership between Zeald and Bank of New Zealand (as members of the Digital Boost Alliance).
As founder and creator of one of New Zealand’s most successful ever start-ups My Food Bag as well as Au Pair Link and now Tend Health – Cecilia is a serial innovator and one of New Zealand’s leading entrepreneurs. Cecilia is passionate about helping women in business and solving the everyday problems of working mums and dads.
In this episode we speak with Jordan Thoms, CTO and Co-Founder at Kami. Kami was founded in 2013 by Auckland university students Hengjie Wang, Jordan Thoms, and Alliv Samson along with Bob Drummond, looking for a way to digitally streamline their note-taking. Their digital classroom tool was built to transform documents of any kind into an interactive and more collaborative learning experience. Kami is used by over 30 million educators and students across more than 180 countries, enabling a more engaged and collaborative learning environment both in the classroom and online. Kami was recently named the fastest-growing company in New Zealand in the Deloitte Fast 50 index, and famously celebrated by giving each of its staff a $10,000 bonus. In this episode Jordan talks to us about the company, and the role technology has played in their success.
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.
Michael has over 30 years of experience across Financial Markets, Business Development and Technology roles in categories from finance to beverages to software. Since the 90s, Michael has been involved in the commercialisation of opportunities offered by new technology and led large complex organisations along their digital transformation pathway. Michael has worked in markets including Japan, Australia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Singapore and of course New Zealand. In this episode Michael talks about the re-imagining of the Forsyth Barr digital experience, a project they kicked off a little over 18 months ago. What that means for the customer experience and how it has driven a change in mindset more broadly across the organisation.
PlaceMakers digital transformation has been a multi-year programme transforming finance, supply chain, operations and created a customer facing digital channel to market in order to create an improved customer experience for both its 2,500 staff and 20,000+ customers. Going from completely manual paper based processes it has changed how it operates with digital mobile solutions used for all transactions creating live status updates, sending 1.5million customer notifications and has reduced paper useage by over 11million pages. In the last 12 months it has launched placemakers.co.nz retail eCommerce together with its Trade App and Trade Portal which have over 11,000 users and 100,000 monthly sessions
In this episode, James Dalglish and Kevin Dang chat about their Rental management system. This system allowed them to manage their Fleet, customers, users, reservations, pricing and a whole lot more. They decided to build their own Rental management system after evaluating the market and not finding a platform that met their needs from a functionality and innovation perspective. One of the values at GO Rentals has always been Customer service first and they needed a flexible platform that allowed them to enhance the customer experience through digital touch points such as their mobile App and self service kiosk machines.