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Clinton Browne

CTO | Tech M&A Advisor – Private Equity, Due Diligence MBA, BTech (Hons), BSc, ITIL® (Expert), MCSD & AWS

EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW

Innovative Cloud Technologist with 30 years’ experience delivering creative, client centric applications & products and business driven solutions. Proven C-Level leadership experience with a successful background is  in the Financial & IT sectors. Commercially aware, with broad experience, having worked across the spectrum from FinTech, technology start-ups to world-class & international organisations.

Experienced leader in Cloud, Application Development, Agile & DevOps and thought leadership, specialising in system design, ALM, CI/CD, SDLC & automation.


Strategic approach to successful hands-on leadership
, engaging with board level, C-level, key business stakeholders, third parties & all levels of an organisation.


Highly accomplished at delivering change and implementing best practices,
coaching & mentoring, building strong teams & driving a performance driven culture.


MBA (Technology Management), B Tech (Hons), BSc (IT) and ITIL Expert qualified with strong experience of implementing and driving best practice frameworks & tools.

Work experience

2021/10present

CTO / Technology Advisor / M&A / Technical Diligence

RingStone

RingStone is a leading tech due diligence, value creation, and software provider. RingStone partners with private equity investors, software and tech-enabled companies to add value to their businesses and investments. RingStone provides company benchmarks, technology due diligence, and a host of other services including software architecture and organisational diagnostics.

Lead buy-side and sell-side technology engagements, mentoring, and coaching, as well as transformation programs (Cloud, Agile, DevOps).

2019/06Present

Technology Expert/Advisor

GLG (Gerson Lehrman Group)

Technical Expert in the field of FinTech / Finance, Cloud SaaS, Media & Telecoms, Entertainment & Gaming, E-commerce, Data Management and Analytics

2020/05present

Senior Technical Consultant

Third Bridge Group Limited

Fuelling the world’s top investors and business leaders with top advisory and research that drives smarter and faster decisions.

2021/062021/11

Interim Chief Technology Officer / VP Engineering

Streetbees

Streetbees is an AI-powered Consumer Intelligence platform, which identifies global growth opportunities for world-leading brands like Unilever, Coty, RB and Danone. Connecting companies through advanced machine learning with over 5 million consumers worldwide and providing in the moment insights. Streetbees is a 6-year-old start-up that secured a record-breaking £80 million in series B funding.

Key duties included scaling the engineering team, driving digital transformation and improving team health and efficiencies, whilst pivoting from a service-oriented system to a SaaS-based platform.

2019/062021/06

CTO / M&A / Technical Diligence / IT Transformation / CIO

Crosslake Technologies

Transformational and short term engagements helping Start-ups & SMEs leverage technology, tools, and processes, to rapidly scale and grow as an organisation. Engagements included Interim CTO, Organisation & Process analysis, AWS & Azure Cloud Strategies, Technical Due Diligence for M&A, Agile coaching, and CIO Advisory services.

  • Led numerous Private Equity technical due diligences (Buy-side Due Diligence & Sell-Side Diligence & Preparation) leading to circa of $12B successful investment outcomes
  • Advisory to CIO/CTO, e.g., mentoring of CTO for a Pharma Life-Science, while scaling the engineering teams and acquiring two other leading life-science companies within the AI / Machine Learning space
  • Led several Organisation and Process re-orgs for SME to large firms, establishing a path for the engineering organisations to grow and scale
2019/102020/03

SVP Technology Re-Engineering

Paysafe Group

Paysafe Group is a multinational online payments company with over 20 years in payments and home of Skrill, Netteller, Paysafe Card, iPayments, Payolution, Rapid Transfer and Unity payment platforms. 

  • Led a 6-month engagement to build Paysafe's multi-cloud migration strategy for both AWS and Azure representing a £12m Cloud investment
  • Established Cloud training programs targeting 1,100 engineers achieving 48 certified professional within 2 months, establishing an AWS Cloud hub
  • Led the Cloud migration of Paysafe's large footprint of applications, platforms and services across multiple technologies hosted in 11 Data Centres across Europe / UK & NA, and migrate these to the Cloud
2018/092019/09

Chief Information Officer

Bofin Tech Services

Built a mobile-first, worldwide challenger bank based on the Booking.com / Uber model and rapidly scaled the technology, people, and process. Complete design and build from Sprint 0 to App Store release implementing a cloud-first, military-grade secure and highly scalable mobile platform.

Key Achievements:

  • Built a high-performing, technical team based out of India and UK
  • Developed an efficient delivery pipeline based on Azure DevOps
  • Implemented DevOps, CI/CD & Test Automation to drive quality
  • Increased cybersecurity through cutting-edge facial recognition, document verification combined with geolocation and analytics

Key Duties:

  • Led all technology, IT Infrastructure, Engineering and Service Operations and managing a team of 60+ individuals and contractors with aim to rapidly scale the team
  • Develop Technology Strategies and Planning Roadmaps that aligned with the business strategy and objectives
  • Delivery of innovative, stable, and secure technology platforms
2015/092018/09

Chief Technology Officer

Payment Cloud Technologies

PCT is a global digital payments solution company, offering Banking, prepay, mobile and e-commerce services and solutions to the Corporate, Financial Services and Government sectors.

Built a best-in-class FinTech organisation with global reach and Blue-Chip clients. Transformed the technology offering from prepaid cards to a full-featured cloud-based digital banking service.

 Key Achievements:

  • Built a complete Cloud First Banking Platform that was shortlisted for several industry awards and showcased by Microsoft for use of innovative Azure technologies within the Financial & Payments industry
  • Consolidated several legacy vendor management systems onto a best-in-class Azure Cloud offering in under 9 months
  • Led from tender to architecture, to successful delivery of the Irish Post Office (AnPost) digital banking offering whilst achieving all key target deliverables - https://www.anpost.com/Money
  • Transitioned from a stagnant waterfall to a fully-fledged Agile DevOps environment with Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery and automated testing whilst improving output and quality by 220%
  • Achieved PCI DSS 3.2 Level 1 and ISO27001 certification on a bootstrap budget, addressing critical security & monitoring concerns

 Key Duties:

  • Overseeing all aspects of technology, IT Infrastructure and Operations 
  • Build Technology Strategy and Planning Roadmaps in line with business strategy, orchestrate delivery of innovative, stable, and secure technology platforms
2007/092015/06

Head of Web & Mobile Development

Electronic Arts

During the 8-year tenure, I built-up and led the Global Web & Mobile department for Enterprise Applications Services across Electronic Arts. This involved managing a large portfolio of web applications designed to cater to the business and corporate needs, building up mobile development capabilities within IT and managing & supporting several large implementations and customisations of third-party applications.

 Responsibilities:

  • Led a global team of architects, designers, and dev engineers
  • Delivered an $8.4 million ROI project (3-year projection) over 18 months with combined internal & offshore teams under $680k
  • Managed a large portfolio of over 60 web & third-party applications for North America / Europe / Asia Pacific
  • Implemented various methodologies tailored around business process and requirements - Agile, Prince2, Hybrid Waterfall
  • Defined Web & Mobile Strategies and drove continuous service improvement, defined roadmaps, drove efficiency, standardisation of processes and methodologies within my remit and department
  • Managed team capacity planning, resource allocation and estimations to ensure the various team can meet deliverables on time and within budget
  • Managed & strengthened working relationships within the business, offshore partners, and third-party providers
  • Continually improved availability and performance of the Web & Mobile Services & Infrastructure through means such as virtualisation, rationalisation, employing a standardised framework and validating recovery capabilities
  • Overall departmental accountability for development plans, designs, prioritisation & development strategy
2004/092007/09

Various IT Roles

G8Wave International LTD - Senior Development Manager

Burgundy Global LTD - Senior Dev / Architect

Atlas Telecom LTD - Lead Data Architect

2000/012004/04

Founder & Chief Technical Officer

Mobile Internet Gateway LTD

Founded Mobile Internet Gateway (MIG) and grew the company through MBO and incubation to second round of funding to become one of the market leaders in South Africa in Premium Mobile Content and text messaging. Developed the end-to-end systems including the client-side Bulk SMS solution suite, the Web Portals and the backend messaging platform that integrated into the Mobile Networks.

Responsibilities:

  • Head of Technology, Software Development, and Infrastructure 
  • Designed & developed the multi-tiered messaging gateway, remote client software and web services