After Glaxo I moved to Standard Chartered Bank (SCB) to work as an IT strategist.  My job was to come up with what we termed the ‘Next Generation Infrastructure’ – essentially all of the underlying technical components that would allow the bank to take advantage of changing technology (such as the home PC) and emerging phenomena such as the Internet. I spent almost three years at SCB, travelling from London to South East Asia (Hong Kong, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur) almost every month.

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I left in 1998 to become Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Allied Irish Bank in Dublin, and I stayed there for four enjoyable years.  At the centre of a complicated IT estate sat a home-written banking system, coded in COBOL and Assembler and integrated with IBM’s MQ Series messaging system – on which the bank’s day-to-day operation depended.  I learnt a lot about retail banking at AIB.

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I joined Capgemini when I moved back to London in 2004.  This is when I experienced offshoring at scale.  In 2006 I left to join Kainos, a software company.  Kainos had 200 people when I started, and now has more than 1,500.  I was lucky to be part of the company as it grew, and I helped launch it on the London Stock Exchange in 2015.