Rich Cooper Email & Phone Number

Global Online Mba

Luxembourg

I wanted to find a role that would provide more home/life flexibility for the duration of our time in Luxembourg to support our family situation. I took the opportunity to follow a lifelong passion and studied and qualified as a personal fitness trainer. Working independently allowed me to balance work and home life accordingly, and I was able to leverage the skills developed throughout my career to grow and develop a small but profitable, and highly rewarding, fitness and nutrition business. Built a strong client base, combining client referrals, social media and website presence and targeted advertising. Built processes and utilised technical knowhow to streamline business administration and minimise inefficiencies. Adapted quickly to COVID restrictions, ensuring that clients could continue their fitness journeys whilst ensuring I could still allocate sufficient time to support home schooling and childcare of my two young children.

Luxembourg

Trusted advisor to the CEO of an exciting technology start-up in Luxembourg, focusing on reorganisation and updating internal processes to support existing clients and improve new client implementations as the organisation expands. Led and managed the seamless onboarding of new clients, ensuring a smooth transition and exceptional service quality. Created a comprehensive professional services program framework, strategically positioning the company to support and facilitate future growth and expansion initiatives. Recruited and trained key staff and built robust, repeatable processes to ensure business implementations continued to succeed after I left the organization to move to the UK.  Advised CEO on use of AI software to enhance both the product offering and the implementation strategy. Revamped the client training strategy to target improved client satisfaction and competence, while reducing training time and resources required.

Luxembourg

Bridged the gap between global business and IT teams to ensure client technical needs are delivered through practical solutions, whilst building trust between teams and improving tech delivery quality in a complex environment. Designing and owning delivery of a new system to allow the business to optimise loan allocations to securitised portfolios and perform ‘what-if’ analysis to assess impacts of external factors. Supporting the wider IT delivery team through providing agile development consultancy, identifying problem areas and creating resolution plans, making priority calls and managing business stakeholder expectations. Conducted detail data analysis to help identify more efficient allocation of capital to loan securitisations to maximise use of available collateral and ultimately direct bottom line growth.

Birmingham, United Kingdom

I joined Contigo to lead their Consultancy Practice, overseeing all software implementations at clients and helping Contigo grow the business. During my time at Contigo we achieved consistent double-digit annual revenue growth and a significant growth in our client base.Given the close-knit energy trading industry, client satisfaction was critical to our success and survival. As Consultancy Practice Manager I had daily interaction with key clients as I had overall responsibility for all our client software implementations and directly managed our most complex and high profile client implementations. As a lean firm we had challenges around resourcing, budgets and product investment and I often had to make decisions or influence executives to take a direction that had a key impact on the company strategy. My role had a broad remit and I played a key role in creating and developing revenue growth opportunities, improving capabilities, increasing efficiency and controlling costs across the organisation.My key achievements included: Successful delivery of multiple implementations for key strategic clients who were dominant players in their respective industries.  Managed key client relationships and led many pre-sales activities to help secure new clients and profitable contracts. Managed a growing team of project managers and business analysts. Provided escalation support to implementations, including making difficult decisions and diffusing difficult client situations.In addition to my Consultancy achievements I was actively involved in improving and growing other parts of the business, for example: Set-up a framework for managing third party consultancies Created and sponsored a rapid implementation process for smaller or less-complex clients Enhanced our pre-sales process to better qualify clients Led an initiative to streamline our internal processes for creating new contracts

London, United Kingdom

Trayport is a market leading European energy trading execution software firm to work in an expanding Project Delivery function. As Programme Manager I was responsible for the following: Managed the implementation of a new £1.2m regulatory trade reporting service, from initial requirements gathering to client rollout. I had full delivery management responsibilities for the solution and worked closely with new clients to ensure our solution was established and ready at their sites so they could meet their regulatory reporting obligations. Managed the development of our trade clearing and confirmations product stream. During this time I worked closely with agile coaches and experts to build a high-performing scrum team and build a high quality, profitable software product. Once this scrum process was established in the team, I rolled this out across the wider Technology division. Responsible for the Trayport delivery portfolio, ensuring all projects were aligned with strategic objectives and client commitments and ensuring that benefits were measured and realised. I setup and built a strong PMO function, ensuring accurate initiative budgeting and financial tracking, improving delivery practices and improved client and stakeholder management.  Line managed the Projects function, including performance management, compensation management and recruitment to build and maintain a high performing team.

London, United Kingdom

I moved back to London in early 2012 and took an internal transfer to Macquarie’s UK division. As IT Account Manager I oversaw all IT matters relating to the Metals & Agriculture Trading division. My IT Account Management role focused on creating and maintaining IT budgets for the financial year, covering resource, infrastructure, software license and office costs, as well as building a pipeline of work to support the business goals, whilst working to ensure changes were in line with IT strategy.

Sydney, Australia

I moved to Sydney in early 2008 and secured a senior IT Project Manager role at Macquarie Group. I successfully delivered multiple IT projects on time and to budget using agile delivery methodologies supporting the Core banking business for 2 years. I was promoted to a programme manager role and managed a multi-stream AU$3m+ programme to provide an full scale end-to-end system replacement. This involved significant delivery complexity, including customizing and integrating a 3rd party solution, a complex infrastructure provision, multiple interface developments and a complicated data migration. Following successful project implementation, I managed a programme of AU$1.5m+ UK and Australian projects to further embed and enhance the new platform to continue to support business growth.My role then changed to manage Macquarie’s core banking IT project portfolio. My own delivery responsibilities included establishing and managing an AU$2m+ datawarehouse migration programme from conception. I worked with senior IT and business managers to establish clear programme goals and built and maintained a delivery pipeline to achieve this. I managed a team of over 20 staff, through 5 project manager direct reports. I represented IT at steering group level on key projects as a trusted technical advisor and project delivery expert.Over and above my project delivery role, I also delivered the following initiatives:  Executed significant process changes, including more streamlined defect management, more visible and accurate status reporting, data migration and release and post release procedures. Initiated, developed and rolled-out the IT graduate mentoring programme, enabling new graduates to gain insight from senior leaders, discuss complex issues and extend their networks. I created and led a division-wide Innovation initiative to promote staff creativity and provide a fast track route for cutting edge ideas to be progressed to assessment and execution.

London, United Kingdom

Following promotion from the Lloyds graduate management programme, I managed multiple projects from kick-off through to closure, building up a strong base and experience of project delivery.

London, United Kingdom

Multiple 6 month placements in different teams within the IT division on Lloyds Graduate Trainee scheme.

Bsc., Economics

Msc., Computing

Master Of Business Administration - Mba