Stuart Cole Email & Phone Number

Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

I’ve joined the original squad that is building the new AMP Bank - a fully digital bank with awesome products delivered through a mobile app that’s packed with features to make banking easy for everyday Aussies and small businesses.We’re setting up a whole new digital business, building solutions customers have actually asked for, and shaping how that business runs. Only we’re doing it with the backing of a tech platform that works (the same tech that fuelled Starling Bank’s success in the UK) and the financial muscle of AMP’s 175+ year heritage. We’re like the love child of a big four and a fintech startup - agile and hands-on meets established and fully resourced.We plan to be in the hands of customers by early 2025, with a go hard, go fast early approach. Exciting times ahead.As the IT Operations Manager at the new AMP Bank, I'll be overseeing the seamless integration and reliability of our tech infrastructure and services, ensuring our new bank provides robust performance and security. Collaborating with a talented and dynamic team, we're leveraging cutting-edge technology to help deliver an innovative and hassle-free banking experience.

Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Helia is a publicly-listed Lenders Mortgage Insurance (LMI) company whose products allow their clients (financial institutions) to provide mortgages to home buyers who cannot meet deposit requirements. • People management including hiring, training, mentoring of direct and indirect reports.• Leadership of the infrastructure and service desk teams. The infrastructure team manages internal company enterprise infrastructure as well as a combination public (AWS) and private cloud platforms, which host Helia’s public facing services. End user compute infrastructure is supported by the service desk team.• Worked closely with vendors and our security, risk and governance teams to identify and remediate findings from security reports (eg. Penetration tests, vulnerability detections), ISO27001 and CPS 234 audits and BCP activities such as disaster recovery drills.• Responsible for the performance, availability and security of the infrastructure platforms.• Embedded security operations within the existing infrastructure and services teams and their BAU processes.• Facilitation of Agile ceremonies such as daily stand-ups, sprint retrospectives, sprint planning and backlog grooming sessions.• Ensure the infrastructure is secured from unauthorised access, malware, vulnerabilities, and other security issues. • Relationship management with Helia’s largest vendors, including AWS, MSP and other vendors.• Development of annual and quarterly technology and operational strategic roadmaps.

North Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Sandstone Technology is a leading Australian financial technology company which provides digital banking products and services to financial institutions. Our solutions include products for retail banking, loan origination and intelligent document processing. Backed by AWS, our security-first cloud solution is a highly available, performant, and integrated platform that allows our bank clients to put their customers first.• Managing the day-to-day operations of Sandstone Cloud Services platform (SCS) backed by AWS.• Ensure SCS platform and Sandstone infrastructure complies with company’s BCP framework.• Facilitation of regular ISO27001 compliance audits. • Ensure an adequate Disaster Recovery plan is in place for applications and infrastructure (meeting RTO/RPO objectives as per SLA agreements) and management of regular disaster recovery drills to demonstrate compliance.• Development and enforcement of strict processes around systems which contain confidential data of our financial institution clients.• Ensure the infrastructure is secured from unauthorised access, malware, vulnerabilities, and other security issues. • Drive incident management and response processes, including RCA and post-incident reporting.• Management of all 3rd party vendors partnered with SCS.• Financial management – including annual budgets, financial reporting and AWS cost optimisation.• Continuous improvement of platform through automation and process optimisation.• Development of quarterly and annual roadmaps and ensuring ongoing alignment with the company’s strategic objectives. • Facilitation of Agile ceremonies such as daily stand-ups, sprint retrospectives, sprint planning and backlog grooming sessions. • People Management including hiring, training, mentoring, and coaching of direct reports. Conducting annual performance reviews.

Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Whilst consulting, I worked with a number of SMEs to enact positive change in the context of their IT infrastructure, assets and processes and was able to use my previously gained experience and skills to bring financial, efficiency and capability improvements which benefited their entire organisation. Some of the services and projects I engaged in are listed below. • Ground-up redevelopment of telephony infrastructure.• Migration of on-premise productivity applications to both Google Workspace and Office 365.• Implementation, configuration and migration to SaaS solutions such as BambooHR, Xero, Deputy, Slack, Confluence, Shopify and more.• Provided maintenance, security upgrades and migration of websites between webhosting and cloud service providers as required.• Liaised with IT and telecommunications vendors.• Security audits of both on-premise and internet-based infrastructure and assets.• Identification of IT operational inefficiencies and implementation of processes and automation to mitigate these issues.• Hardware acquisition, configuration and deployment, including networking, work stations and servers.• General systems administration of Windows and Mac desktops and laptops.• Authored documentation of IT systems and processes.

Sydney, Australia

Responsibilities:• Management of large client relationships at an executive level.• Assisted clients with the development of strategic roadmaps.• Pre-sales, based on the knowledge obtained from strategic roadmaps, capabilities and changes within the service catalogue.• This role also required organisational specific knowledge of the Service Catalogue, Service delivery Processes, Project management, SLA management and Change control management.• Acted as a final point of escalation for clients with 24 Hour support.• Internal relationship management in a team composed of Executive Account Managers. (EAMs), Commercial Account Managers (CAMs) and Portfolio Engineers (PEs). • Implementation of policies and procedures for clients.• Identification of areas of weakness internally and assisted with remediation where possible.• Monthly executive reporting and on-going documentation and root cause analysis.• Drove service delivery through collaboration with clients and the global service teams.• High level design of solutions in collaboration with the engineering team.• Built strong relationships with colleagues. This was a critical component in order to leverage these relationships to meet the common goal of exceeding client expectations.

Sydney, Australia

Hostopia Australia (Formerly Digital Pacific and then acquired by Newfold Digital) is one of the largest web hosting providers in Australia and owns and operates a number of brands including Digital Pacific, Crucial, Anchor, Panthur, Web24 and Ausweb.With an emphasis on providing superior support, our business model is focused on reliability and trust, which we believe is attributed to our success over the past 15 years.Tasks and responsibilities include:• Role reported directly to the CEO and included aspects of a CIO type role.• Development of product, technology and operational strategic roadmaps. • Management of seven direct and 60 indirect reports in the support, technical operations, cloud service delivery, billing and office administrations teams.• Creation of an independent Business Improvement team tasked with company-wide continual process improvement and quality assurance.• Management of CAPEX and OPEX budgets.• Contributed to significant revenue growth initiatives.• Responsibility for the HR life cycle involving authoring position descriptions, performance reviews, performance management, remuneration reviews, interviews of applicants and on-boarding and off-boarding of staff.• Nurtured career development of team leaders by providing mentoring, training and support, allowing them to improve team effectiveness.• Created a strong culture of merit based internal promotion.• Initiation and oversight of numerous concurrent projects.• Introduced daily stand up meetings to facilitate root cause analysis of issues, inter-team communication and to ensure that operational and project blockers were remediated.• Managed organisational response to major service interruptions and incidents.• Acted as liaison with external entities such as vendors, high value clients and regulatory and law enforcement agencies (state and federal police, ACCC).• Development of internal policies, processes and documentation.

Sydney, Australia

Digital Pacific was acquired by Hostopia Australia and I was promoted to Chief Operating Officer of Hostopia Australia in September 2017. My responsibilities as Operations Manger for Digital Pacific Group were as follows:• Responsible for the day to day running of the business which allowed the CEO and CFO to focus on major strategic initiatives such as business acquisitions and other growth strategies.• Responsibility for the management of multidisciplinary teams including technical support, technical operations, systems engineering, networking, software development, data centre operations, billing, sales and marketing.• Responsible for the post-acquisition integration of multiple companies in the web hosting space. This included integration of client databases, staff, office equipment, servers and other assets.• Nurtured career development of staff through training and mentorship.• Initiation and management of numerous concurrent projects.• Identification of operational and financial inefficiencies and risks and implementation of processes to mitigate these issues.• Review of operational procedures to ensure that quality standards were being exceeded.

Sydney, Australia

• Management of a busy, 24/7 helpdesk with staff located in three countries.• Created policies to increase efficiency and minimise risk in technical support procedures.• Resolution of more serious client complaints.• Managed organisational response to large-scale service interruptions and other incidents.• Facilitated weekly meetings of infrastructure and technical support teams.• Liaised with suppliers and high priority clients.• Assisted in organisation gaining ISO/IEC 20000 certification and AuDA accreditation.• Provided input to upper management with regards to strategic decisions.• Performance management of technical staff and provided recommendations with regards to further training or disciplinary action.• Identified potential operational risks and proposed mitigation strategies.• Ensured that both internal operational level agreements and client service level agreements were being exceeded.• Coordinated weekly audits of support tickets to ensure quality assurance criteria were being satisfied.

Sydney, Australia

• Designed and managed the deployment of a unified authentication system across thousands of heterogenous hosts and devices (Linux, Windows, out-of-band devices, network infrastructure).• Designed, developed and deployed a service announcement system to notify clients of service interruptions.• Managed project to unify all product offerings under a single hardware and software infrastructure. This increased the scalability, reliability and manageability of these products.• Researched and tested new technologies to determine if they could be implemented in new products.• Liaised with sales staff and clients on highly technical sales proposals.• Creation of technical documentation.• Authored the content of the corporate website.• Designed and managed the deployment of the company VOIP PBX system.• Managed the large scale deployment of hardware into datacenters.• Authored technical articles for the company blog.• Tested and managed the deployment of a cloud-based VPS and shared hosting product.• Liaised with software development team with regards to system requirements on various projects.

Sydney, Australia

• Ensured high availability of infrastructure through enterprise-wide planning, testing, implementation and support.• Planned and implemented upgrades to system hardware and software.• Optimised system security and performance with proactive changes.• Monitored ICT infrastructure and provided statistical reports of both real-time and historical metrics.• Mentoring and training of junior staff.• Extensive experience with hardware in a large data centre environment including upgrades and maintenance.• Creation of scripts and processes to increase efficiency of repetitive tasks. • Acted as a point of escalation to level one and two support requests..

Sydney, Australia

• Responsible for providing desktop support to 25 in-house users.• Administration of web, terminal services and database servers.• Hardware procurement, installation and configuration.• Installation, configuration and maintenance of desktop and server machines.• Setup and maintenance of VPN between Sydney and regional QLD offices.• Installation, configuration and maintenance of IP security cameras.• Network administration and troubleshooting.• Production of documentation.

Master Of Business Administration - Mba, Business Administration And Management, General

Bachelor Of Science (Information Systems)

Higher School Certificate