Our consultants have unique insights into the Australian Financial Services Industry:
Andrew McDonald (B.Comm), Executive Director
Ben Forrest (B.Comp.Sys, M.Comp.Sys), Executive Director
Matthew Sinclair (B.Info.Sci, MBA), Executive Director
Andrew Mitchell (B.E. Hons), Consultant
Matt Havilah (B.E. Hons), Consultant
Sean Rafferty, Consultant
Andrew McDonald
Director (download CV)
Andrew has more than 14 years of senior program delivery experience in the banking and financial services sector. In the last 5 years, Andrew has focused on a number of large scale programs across the Australian banking community, including AML, process redesign, online banking and identity / security management. Working at the heart of Australia’s tier-1 retail online banking environment, Andrew understands and has experienced the issues in delivering business critical delivery and change management programs in a competitive and increasingly frugal project environment.
Leading and working within large IT project teams in Australia, Europe and North America, Andrew has gained experience delivering large, complex and highly integrated cross-border banking solutions for asset management, leasing, treasury and online banking within many of the world’s largest financial institutions.
Andrew has a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Canterbury (Business Administration and Marketing).
In the role of Program Principal at Carpadium Consulting, Andrew concentrates on managing complex programs of work that tie together business and technology streams to add real value to the enterprise.
Ben Forrest
Director (download CV)
Ben has more than 12 years experience in the delivery of large complex implementations within IT and business in a variety of segments around the world. In the last three years, Ben focused in the retail and business banking arena, and for the previous 5+ years in the telecommunications industry.
Ben was a founding member of Westpac’s Trust Centre, appointed as the Chief Operating Officer. His primary role was to establish operations cognisant of the multiple internal and external Trust Centre stakeholders. With a technical background and an extensive range of delivery experience in large, complex and operationally sensitive systems, Ben lead a team to work within the rapidly changing scope and boundaries of an Australian-first concept in financial services collaboration.
For the majority of his career, Ben worked with the world’s leading management consulting firm, Accenture. After starting as a graduate, and across numerous projects with various delivery roles, Ben left as a Senior Manager. His time included 3 years in a start-up focused consulting and products company, Imagine Broadband. Ben was a founding member of the Australian office before returning to the UK to establish the product deployment and support group for the company’s innovative provisioning and management products.
Ben graduated in 1997 with a combined Bachelors and Masters in Computer Systems and Software engineering from York University, UK, majoring in real-time systems and the management of their implementation.
Ben concentrates on understanding complex technical and business problems, establishing frameworks for capturing a problem, documenting and sharing with and influencing stakeholders. His passion is enabling effective delivery through adherence to rigorous processes what-ever the lifecycle type or stage.
Matthew Sinclair
Director (download CV)
Matthew is a technology strategy specialist with 14 years experience in software engineering, consulting and product development. Matthew has delivered highly complex technology systems in the telecommunications, financial services and payments sectors. Working with consulting organisations and on product teams in Australia and South East Asia, Matthew has been involved in the delivery of projects ranging from network analysers, to flight simulators and more recently high-performance mission-critical EFT payments transaction switching.
Matthew was a founding member of the Westpac Trust Centre (2006-2007), appointed as the Chief Technology Officer and responsible for all Trust Centre technology from strategy to execution. Matthew led the technology team across various Trust Centre endeavours in the collaborative identity management domain, from bank-centric PKI to collaboration with banks and telcos in collaborative messaging and over-the-air digital signing.
Previously Matthew spent 5 years as the Engineering Manager for EFT switch software vendor Distra. Matthew matured the engineering team from a start-up/R&D group of 5 engineers to a high performance, agile development team of 15 engineers, who constantly meet or exceed engineering and product development deadlines. Distra has subsequently gone on to be one of the most exciting software vendors in the next generation payments space.
Additionally Matthew has assisted the Macquarie Bank online team as a senior technical architect, formed part of a hand-selected team of senior IT researchers at the prestigious Nokia Research Centre (Sydney).
Matthew has a Bachelor of Information Science (B.Info.Sc) from Newcastle University, and a Masters of Business Administration (Executive) from the Australian Graduate School of Management.
In the role of Technology Principal at Carpadium Consulting, Matthew concentrates on technology strategy, high-technology start-up and new product development and delivery. Matthew’s balance of technology and business qualifications, combined with years of high-technology and start-up/entrepreneurial experience, provide the ability to straddle the complexities of emerging technologies and bring them into focus in a business context. Matthew also has a unique insight into the world of payments, and how new technologies such as peer-to-peer interactions and mobility will make profound changes to the way these systems work.
Andrew Mitchell
Consultant (download CV)
Andrew has over 15 years of experience in object oriented software architecture and development. Andrew has lead software teams based in Australia and South East Asia in a diverse range of industries including banking and finance, industrial control, and defense. He has been instrumental in the successful delivery of various complex systems including loans origination, legacy software modernization, communications, and traffic technology.
Working closely with the executive management team at Quipoz Andrew successfully introduced a suite of Agile Development tools and methodologies across their product range. The toolset included scrum-based agile task tracking tools, centralised Continuous Integration & Testing engines and peer review mechanisms integrated into the development environment.
Prior to consulting to Quipoz, Andrew lead a team of developers at Sandstone Technology working on the LendFast Enterprise Loans Origination product. Andrew was responsible for architecting and delivering the complex security requirements used on the LendFast Enterprise system and then subsequently rolled out to a range of banking and finance products developed by Sandstone.
Andrew has also lead teams of software engineers at Boeing, Hughes Aircraft, Raytheon and CSC. Andrew is an Agile Development evangilist who specialises in improving developer productivity and troubleshooting complex systems.
Matt Havilah
Consultant (download CV)
Matt’s professional software engineering experience spans a period of over 14 years in roles ranging from developer to consultant to technical architect. Matt has implemented business software solutions in industries as varied as telecommunications, retail and investment banking, insurance, media, logistics and shipping, retail and defense. Examples of such solutions include large-scale portfolio and funds management platforms, online investor service centres, and mission-critical credit settlement payment systems.
Matt is an advocate of disciplined, component-based design to achieve maintainable, decoupled architectures that are readily adapted to changing business environments with reduced cost of ownership. Matt is also passionate about Lean and Agile production processes, eliminating waste, transparently delivering business value earlier and continually improving team effectiveness, cohesion and productivity.
Previously Matt assisted the team at Link Market Services to rebuild an online Investor and Issuer Service Centre, whilst coaching management and development team alike in the efficacy of Agile practices. Through the use of SCRUM-based project management and XP-oriented continuous quality practices, business sponsors were able to attain confidence in the rapid, accurate delivery of critical business features. This foundation of capability improvement and project governance continues to provide benefit today to Link’s business and technology teams.
Working as part of a strategic Funds management system delivery at Macquarie Bank, Matt implemented a leading edge platform to offer investment fund products to retail investors. The dynamic business environment made this exercise particularly challenging, with several key business deals complicating system requirements mid-project. By utilising Agile engineering practices such as pairing, continuous integration, refactoring and unit-testing, Matt and his team were able to expeditiously rework essential platform components and maintain both quality and architectural integrity.
Additionally, Matt has successfully delivered numerous high profile projects with complex business requirements at organisations such as Telstra, Optus, ASX and Westfield Corporation. Matt has a mature and pragmatic approach to delivering lasting business value and assisting teams in improving their ability similarly do so.
Sean Rafferty
Consultant (download CV)
Sean is a Senior Business Analyst with extensive knowledge in all relevant project lifecycle stages. Having worked with many of Australia’s top online brands, in both a delivery and operational capability, his focus is to enable business to harness the competitive advantages possible in a digital, networked environment by providing tactical & strategic solutions. He has worked in both banking and technology industries over the past 8 years.
Sean has gained significant capabilities in numerous areas, including: requirements solicitation; stakeholder engagement and management; user interface design and analysis; information architecture and data scheme design; large scale site design; running requirements workshops and modelling sessions; billing system integration within online environments; numerous life-cycle models including Waterfall, Agile / Extreme and RUP.
As a pragmatist with a flair for design, Sean contributes across the life-cycle, in any environment. Understanding the key elements to complete superior outcomes at the initial early stages ensuring final project success.