Ian Smith Email & Phone Number

Vancouver, B.C., Ca

Los Angeles, California, Us

Joined to lead technology for an innovative B2B/B2C online gaming scale-up in the US market (online gaming powered by Horse Racing/Sports) which combines patented propriety technology with best-in-class third-party solutions.Hands-on leadership of product, engineering, platform, and IT operations teams based in the US and Europe(~40 people).Supported the scale-up by driving an organisational-wide transformation, introducing new agile ways ofworking, improved product planning and prioritisation, a re-org into cross-functional product-dev teams and new processes (e.g. agile service management). Focus is on how to be a ‘world-class B2B platform provider’.Led the strategic decision making and build of a new B2B gaming product, aimed at making the platformeasier to integrate with for new customers (reducing future integration timelines from months to weeks).Subsequently led the integration and migration onto a new third-party Player Account Management system (Strive Gaming) for our B2C platform, effectively the first ‘customer’ using the new gaming product.Led the development of www.bspot.com, GPNs B2C brand, which runs on the platform and is a showcase for what the product can do to attract future B2B partners. Responsible for product and development of much of the platform, focusing on KPIs which will help push the business towards profitability and potential exit. During this time led the re-build of the core ‘digital’ systems (web sites, app, CMS, marketing tech, CRM).

New York, New York, Us

Responsible for Technology Strategy of the International Division covering PokerStars, Betfair International and AdjaraBet – a business serving millions of customers globally with billions of revenue.Leading member of the CTO Team driving transformational change across a technology function of over1500 people – leading on operating model, agile ways of working and platform modernisation.Established and lead a legacy platform transformation programme, established to move the agingPokerStars technology into the digital age. Main focus areas include Engineering Enablers (Cloud, CI/CD,improved automation), Architecture Remediation (APIs, Event-driven architecture), Channel Technologies(web, native, marketing technology) and Data (building a new AWS data platform).Member of the New Market Development SteerCo, representing technology in helping drive new marketentry.Supported global M&A activity, leading technology due diligence on large corporate opportunities.

Ocean Village, Gibraltar, Gi

Leadership of product development and IT operations for all Rank Interactive technology platforms (Mecca and Grosvenor websites, eleven Stride sites and the core platform); a digital business making ~£200m in revenue annually, with millions of customers and peak loads of over 10,000 concurrent players.Responsible for a technology team of 150+ people in the digital technology organisation based in London, Gibraltar, Cape Town, Mexico and Mauritius. Currently leading the migration of the Rank digital brands (Mecca, Grosvenor and Bella Casino) onto the Stride proprietary technology platform. This initiative is a £10m+, two-year programme of work with the goal of creating a technology function and platform capable of handling significantly larger customer volumes; a modernised (in part re-developed) technology platform, feature parity with the existing (outgoing) platform and establishing an agile technology operating model. The first phase of the migration (migrating the Bella Casino website) was successfully completed in November 2020.Established new in-house development teams to take responsibility for previously outsourced web development saving Rank ~£2.5m annually as well as introducing consistent agile way of working across the whole platform and organisation.

United Kingdom , Jersey, Gb

Led a globally distributed product and technology team for a proprietary gaming platform running ten B2C brands (including www.spinandwin.com, www.magicalvegas.com) and one B2B brand (www.aspers.com), driving revenues of over £50m annually. Teams located in London, Cape Town, Mexico and Mauritius.Consolidated Product, Product Design (UX/UI), Engineering and IT into a single Digital Technology function. Introduced customer focused, agile and lean ways of working such as business aligned, cross functional development squads and value stream funding.Defined a technology strategy to scale and modernise the technology function and platform in preparation for the Rank acquisition – an approach to systematically improve/transform almost every aspect of product and technology. This included cloud migration (AWS), fully automated CI/CD pipelines and a greater emphasis on automated testing. This strategy laid the foundation for the future Rank migration programme.Initiated a platform wide modernisation programme to move towards a modern, containerised, micro service and event-driven architecture which could meet business needs of faster time to market for new features, ability to deal with ever changing regulations and to offer greater personalisation.Began scaling the team significantly (from ~30 to 150) – including setting up an offshore development centre in Cape Town to provide a lower cost option for recruiting talent.

London, England, Gb

Responsible for overall Global technology strategy that served a 2.7m customer base across online and retail, £1.7bn net revenue, concurrent player volumes of over 60,000 and underpinning 000s of customer transactions per second during 'peak' sporting events.Led a newly created ‘Global’ Technology function consisting of Business Analysts, Programme and Project Managers, Architects, Developers and QA tasked with the development and delivery of global platform technology.Following the repel of PASPA, led the delivery of a new US (New Jersey) platform, deploying and customising the UK .COM sports front end platform for use in the US, establishing a shared open-source model in the process - alongside CRM, Payments, Customer Services, Data Warehouse and Marketing technology. Defined a technology platform strategy to deliver US-wide expansion and mobilised a large programme (Liberty) team to deliver it - including leading the development of a new brand-new Betting Engine platform (Scala, Kafka, Cassandra, Docker, K8S, AWS). This platform has spearheaded William Hill’s growth in the US and is a key reason for the Caesars acquisition.Part of the corporate development office providing support for US/Global expansion - worked with potential partners, responding to RFIs/RFPs, leading due diligence etc.

London, England, Gb

Responsible for department of over 500 people - architecture, development, business analysis and QA. Led move to a customer-centric and business aligned IT operating model, appointing Head of Technology roles in key business channels to provide greater autonomy.

London, England, Gb

Strategic alignment of Technology development to business evolution - key driver behind Digital Transformation, Technology Innovation/ R&D, Establishment of Product/ Technology R&D Lab, Omni-Channel Platform, Private Cloud.Responsible for overall Group-wide architecture roadmap and continued to lead efforts to bring more technology in-house (examples include a Retail self-service betting terminal, online bonus & loyalty engine, real-time data platform, native app development).Re-located to Shoreditch, London (May 2014) to spearhead the creation of a new Technology R&D hub – setup a small, highly skilled development team focusing on mobile technology and building a new bonus engine.Supported global M&A activity, leading technology due diligence on a number of large corporate opportunities. Running a team of over 50 architects (enterprise, software, solutions, infrastructure, network and data) across all segments within William Hill - online, sports, gaming, customer services, payments, fraud & risk, marketing, data & analytics, retail and trading.

London, England, Gb

Relocated to Gibraltar to formally take on the role of Head of Architecture & Development; mobilised a major initiative to transform William Hill Online into an agile, digital technology provider and ultimately bring more technology in-house (a huge change in company strategy). This helped drive significant double-digit growth for the company, helping William Hill to become the leading UK online bookmaker.Established digital architecture and development practice for new WH Online operation in Gibraltar - grew the team from zero to over 100 architects and developers. Built a strong agile development capability emphasising continuous integration, automated testing, innovation and quality. Kicked off and initially led the development of a brand-new £20m+ customer facing web/mobile betting platform servicing millions of players/60,000 concurrent players/100,000s of products/constant real-time price updates.Supported M&A activity leading technology due diligence on a number of US (Las Vegas) and Australian acquisitions.

London, England, Gb

Re-located to Tel Aviv to help integrate newly acquired digital marketing agency into William Hill and gain extensive exposure to marketing technology landscape and online gaming operations.

London, England, Gb

London, England, Gb

London, England, Gb

Bradford, West Yorkshire, Gb

Responsible for full life-cycle development of internal groupware systems.