Explorer at heart, history buff and boxer
I’ve seen a lot of technology revolutions in my career. What excites me about ComplyWith is the impact we can have.
As a kid, Ben wanted to be an explorer, and his career in tech has taken him to some remote corners of the world. He has called Wellington home for about half his life.
Ben started out in 1998 at Corel, the makers of CorelDRAW! and WordPerfect, when Corel went head to head with Adobe and Microsoft. Back then, a major release took a year or more to build. Once done, the end product was shipped to a factory to be copied onto floppy disks and boxed for shop shelves. Soon after he started, floppies gave way to CD-ROMs. It was the first of many technology shifts Ben has seen first-hand.
Since moving to New Zealand, Ben has worked mainly in SaaS companies across aviation, banking, finance, property management and video. At an aviation startup, he built and managed a maintenance product that was used by small airlines around the world. The role took him to far-off places like Papua New Guinea, Alaska, Tonga and remote airstrips across Australia to train local teams. On one trip to the Solomon Islands he found time to go snorkelling among WWII warship wrecks, which was a highlight for someone that loves history.
More recently at BNZ, he helped move a mainframe system holding billions of dollars in term deposits onto a modern cloud platform.
As CTO, Ben looks after technology across all of ComplyWith, not just Engineering. He also drives the strategic roadmap, from under-the-hood upgrades to new features for customers. Legal is a new field for him, and he enjoys having so much to learn.
Away from work, Ben revels in his hands-on creative projects. Recently he wrote, illustrated, printed and bound a book entirely by hand. He never misses his boxing classes, enjoys getting out on his mountain bike and reads widely on history and politics.
“The view from our office is amazing,” says Ben. “I love a walk along the waterfront, and a sneaky treat from Sixes and Sevens.”
