Chief Technology Officer (Director of Technology)

The organisation

Our customer is a division of a global company with more than 120 years of expertise. They deliver products and solutions in the market of electronic financial transactions. They are considered market leader in their industry. They add value to customers through training and consultancy, test and certification services, security evaluation services and (automated) test tools.

Our customer is formed after the acquisition of a payment technology organization in 2012. By means of both organic growth and through acquisitions, they are now a true global company, within the global parent company.

Since the acquisition in 2012, our customer has expanded from about 100 employees – mainly in the Netherlands – to 600 employees globally. With main hubs in the Netherlands, the United States of America, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Singapore and Australia and offices in many other countries, our customer has a true global footprint.

The position

For their platform and product technology organization, our customer seeks to hire a business leader, in the role Director of Technology, as a successor of the current incumbent. The role can be characterized as Chief Technology Officer.

Due to the organizational structure within the global portfolio-organization, the role is internally classified as Director of Technology.

Tasks & responsibilities

The Director of Technology leads the Technology division. This division is responsible for ensuring test processes are simple and efficient. They test products (smart cards, terminals, UICC cards, and more) with these test tools, hence ensuring interoperability of products.

Their portfolio offers over 80 test tools and simulators covering mobile, payment, transit and e-identification domains. Their tools are accredited and qualified by major payment schemes. To meet particular customer needs, they offer next to its standardized test tools customization of test tools and development of custom made software.

The Technology division has roughly doubled in size since 2012. Currently, the division consists of around 110 employees, of which some 50 work in the Netherlands, 40 in Brazil, 10 in the USA, 5 in the UK and the rest in Singapore. The employees work in either the platform-development team or the product-development team. Both teams are headed by a Head of Department. The Head of Development is currently active on an interim basis.

Tasks & responsibilities

Although the department has doubled in size in terms of employees, the financial results have not grown accordingly. Work is to a large extend incident driven and short term focused. Development processes and developed platform and products are largely engineered to order. This has led to a huge amount of customer specific solutions.

It is believed that modularity of development is very well possible and will bring large benefits, in terms of both efficiency and effectivity. Profit should go up and lead-/development time should go down.

The Director of Technology will bring leadership, structure and discipline in development processes, efficiency in product building and effectivity in cooperation. The Director of Technology will create and sustain an agile and cost-effective workforce and development-culture.

Your short term goal will be to create and own the technology roadmap, based on products and scalable platforms that make testing and certification easier. There is a need for simplicity and the user should be pushed to self-use. Based on the roadmap, you will build the required organizational structure, roles and processes.

Your longer term focus will be on becoming and staying the undisputed industry leader by being the natural provider of solutions to the customers problems. In short, you will focus on idea-generation, creating an executable plan and execution of that plan.

Candidate profile

You have extensive expertise deployed in technology development and IT businesses – preferably but not necessarily in the FinTech industry – and a vast experience with platform- and product development processes. You have a proven track record in execution of complex projects in a multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural environment and have a technical masters degree.

You enjoy the challenge of working abroad (for this role, significant global travel is required) and have fluency in speaking, reading and writing English. Other languages are considered an advantage. You thrive in situations where time is of the essence, complexity is the order of the day, and passion and energy are the fuel that gets things done.

You are considered an effective leader, focusing on communication, culture and competence in the people and teams who execute the work. Foremost however, you focus on processes through which people execute the work and on tools and systems that enable people and processes to perform effectively.

You know how to articulate a clear vision of excellence. You direct people and teams towards a result-orientation with clear goals and targets. You have experience in working in a matrix organization. You advocate and display a transparent and consistent leadership style and take a consequent accountability for performance. You draw focused attention to real root causes and apply proven methodologies for product lifecycle processes and projects and adapt these to the business context.

Towards your team, you provide objective feedback on performance and progress and you establishing trust, through loyalty to people, and commitment and accountability to results. You create common cause through clear communication of needs, dependencies and expectations between teams and stakeholders.

You establish repeatability and efficiency through process automation, and deployment of tools that enhance workflow. You identify and remove waste in the execution workflow. You advocate agility.

Furthermore, people love working with you for your business sense, your drive to collaborate, your silo-breaking approach, your ability to get people work as a team. Next to all that – and above all – you are a transparent and humble leader.

Interested?

You can apply to this position by using the form below. For more information you can contact Harmen Stakenburg at +31 (0)6 19 91 25 82 or Rob Savelkoul +31 (0)6 46 13 61 99 or +35 (0)192 62 33 708).