About me

I started writing commercial software in 1990, on an accounting suite in Durban, and I have not really stopped since.

The path ran through Technikon Natal and a National Diploma in Computer Data Processing, a year of national service where I built an ammunition stores control system and came out a Lieutenant, and then a decade of financial systems — executors, liquidation and distribution at Syfrets, field agent remuneration at Southern Life, point of sale integration at Triple-S. In 1999 I went independent, and that business still exists today as EADS Direct CC, trading as DS Software Development Services.

Consulting for Trustco turned into working for Trustco. I joined as IT Software Systems Manager in 2003, and since 2012 I have been Chief Information Officer of Trustco Group Holdings — oversight of the group’s business systems and infrastructure, its IT team, and a permanent seat on the IT Steering Committee. Across those years the group’s estate grew to roughly ninety production systems: education and student administration, insurance and mobile insurance across several African markets, messaging, property, finance, and from 2014 the Trustco Bank Namibia system and its core modules.

Alongside that, EADS Direct grew a second discipline. Since 2019 the engineering and solar side has run out of Ladismith, headed up by specialists who know that work far better than I do — automated CIP systems, pasteurisers, separators under Siemens PLC control, food-grade stainless welding, and hybrid solar across the Western Cape. My part is oversight, strategic direction and administration. Where DS Software is the architecture, EADS Direct is the workshop.

There is one thread I find quite satisfying. The first real system I worked on, in 1990, was somebody else’s accounting suite — general ledger, debtors, creditors, stock, job costing. Thirty-five years later I ship my own. Win Accounting has those same modules, built properly for South African small business, with point of sale and job costing on the way. It took a whole career to close that loop.

The two halves inform each other more than you would expect. A factory system either works at three in the morning or it does not — there is no partial credit, no patch on Monday. Carrying that standard back into enterprise software changes how you design things.

These days I mostly work by teaming up with people who are excellent at their particular thing, and building something that solves the actual problem. That is the most interesting part of the job, and it is why the door stays open.

Quick profile

• Based in Somerset West, Western Cape
• National Diploma: Computer Data Processing — Technikon Natal and Technikon SA (Commercial Programming III, Distinction)
• English and Afrikaans
• Member of ISACA
• Seamless Africa speaker — Namibian payment streams, 2017
• Trustco Top 40 since its inception in 2015; Top 40 Committee 2019; Top 40 Disciplinary Committee since 2019