Clinton Browne

RingStone works with investors, software, and tech-enabled companies to add value to their businesses and investments. RingStone provides tech due diligence, value creation, benchmarks, and various assessments, and company optimization services including software architecture, transformation programs and organizational diagnostics.

Lead buy-side and sell-side technology engagements, mentoring, and coaching, as well as transformation programs (Cloud, Agile, DevOps).

Streetbees is an AI-powered Consumer Intelligence platform, which identifies global growth opportunities for world-leading brands like Unilever, Coty, RB and Danone. Connecting companies through advanced machine learning with over 5 million consumers worldwide and providing in the moment insights. Streetbees is a 6-year-old start-up that secured a record-breaking £80 million in series B funding.

Key duties included scaling the engineering team, driving digital transformation and improving team health and efficiencies, whilst pivoting from a service-oriented system to a SaaS-based platform.

Transformational and short term engagements helping Start-ups & SMEs leverage technology, tools, and processes, to rapidly scale and grow as an organisation. Engagements included Interim CTO, Organisation & Process analysis, AWS & Azure Cloud Strategies, Technical Due Diligence for M&A, Agile coaching, and CIO Advisory services.

• Led numerous Private Equity technical due diligences (Buy-side Due Diligence & Sell-Side Diligence & Preparation) leading to circa of $12B successful investment outcomes
• Advisory to CIO/CTO, e.g., mentoring of CTO for a Pharma Life-Science, while scaling the engineering teams and acquiring two other leading life-science companies within the AI / Machine Learning space
• Led several Organisation and Process re-orgs for SME to large firms, establishing a path for the engineering organisations to grow and scale

Paysafe Group is a multinational online payments company with over 20 years in payments and home of Skrill, Netteller, Paysafe Card, iPayments, Payolution, Rapid Transfer and Unity payment platforms. 

• Led a 6-month engagement to build Paysafe's multi-cloud migration strategy for both AWS and Azure representing a £12m Cloud investment
• Established Cloud training programs targeting 1,100 engineers achieving 48 certified professional within 2 months, establishing an AWS Cloud hub
• Led the Cloud migration of Paysafe's large footprint of applications, platforms and services across multiple technologies hosted in 11 Data Centres across Europe / UK & NA, and migrate these to the Cloud

Built a mobile first, world-wide challenger bank based on the Booking.com / Uber model and rapidly scaled the technology, people, and process. Complete design and build from Sprint 0 to App Store release implementing a cloud first, military grade secure and highly scalable mobile platform.

Key Achievements:

• Built a high-performing, technical team based out of India and UK
• Developed an efficient delivery pipeline based on Azure DevOps
• Implemented DevOps, CI/CD & Test Automation to drive quality
• Increased cybersecurity through cutting-edge facial recognition, document verification combined with geolocation and analytics
  

Key Duties:

• Led all technology, IT Infrastructure, Engineering and Service Operations and managing a team of 60+ individuals and contractors with aim to rapidly scale the team
• Build Technology Strategy and Planning Roadmaps in line with the business strategy and goals
• Delivery of innovative, stable, and secure technology platforms

PCT is a global digital payments solution company, offering Banking, prepay, mobile and e-commerce services and solutions to Corporate, Financial Services and Government sectors.

Headed PCT’s technology, building a best-in-class FinTech organisation with global reach and Blue-Chip clients. I scaled the technology offering from prepaid / debit card to a fully featured Cloud-Based Digital Banking Platform.

 Key Achievements:

• Built complete Cloud First Banking Platform that was shortlisted for several industry awards and showcased by Microsoft for use of cutting-edge Azure technologies within the Financial & Payments industry
• Consolidated several legacy vendor management systems onto a best-in-class Azure Cloud offering in under 9 months
• Led from tender to architecture, to successful delivery of the Irish Post Office (AnPost) digital banking offering whilst achieving all key target deliverables - https://www.anpost.com/Money
• Transitioned from a stagnant waterfall to a fully-fledged Agile DevOps environment with Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery and automated testing whilst improving output and quality by 220%
• Achieved PCI DSS 3.2 Level 1 & ISO27001 certification on a bootstrap budget, addressing critical security & monitoring concerns previously overlooked

 Key Duties:

• Overseeing all aspects of technology, IT Infrastructure and Operations 
• Build Technology Strategy and Planning Roadmaps in line with business strategy, orchestrate delivery of innovative, stable, and secure technology platforms

During the 8-year tenure, I built-up and led the Global Web & Mobile department for Enterprise Applications Services across Electronic Arts. This involved managing a large portfolio of web applications designed to cater to the business and corporate needs, building up mobile development capabilities within IT and managing & supporting several large implementations and customisations of third-party applications.

 Responsibilities:

• Led a global team of architects, designers, and dev engineers
• Delivered an $8.4 million ROI project (3-year projection) over 18 months with combined internal & offshore teams under $680k
• Managed a large portfolio of over 60 web & third-party applications for North America / Europe / Asia Pacific
• Implemented various methodologies tailored around business process and requirements - Agile, Prince2, Hybrid Waterfall
• Defined Web & Mobile Strategies and drove continuous service improvement, defined roadmaps, drove efficiency, standardisation of processes and methodologies within my remit and department
• Managed team capacity planning, resource allocation and estimations to ensure the various team can meet deliverables on time and within budget
• Managed & strengthened working relationships within the business, offshore partners, and third-party providers
• Continually improved availability and performance of the Web & Mobile Services & Infrastructure through means such as virtualisation, rationalisation, employing a standardised framework and validating recovery capabilities
• Overall departmental accountability for development plans, designs, prioritisation & development strategy

Successfully led and managed multiple development teams on several projects involving the transition of incumbent technologies to the .NET platform, the development of the company’s intranet utilising ASP.NET, creation of report & fault tolerant alerting systems, implementation of a text / SMPP messaging systems, and the development of community-based portals.

Responsibilities:

• Led and managed successful development teams on numerous successful projects
• Implemented Agile framework & SCRUM
• Project managed, organised delegation of work, tasks & time scaled developments
• Developed, implemented & reviewed New Development Procedures and Best Practices
• Responsible for projects full development lifecycle & rollout
• Responsible for Client & interdepartmental liaisons

Directed several Dev & Operations teams from a technical & development standpoint utilising the latest .Net framework

Senior technical lead focusing on Burgundy Global’s online reservation, communication, and payment solution for the ground transportation industry.

Managed and led a small team of DBA’s and developers responsible for Atlas Telecoms billing and reporting systems, the internal MIS and intranet system.

Founded Mobile Internet Gateway (MIG) and grew the company through MBO and incubation to second round of funding to become one of the market leaders in South Africa in Premium Mobile Content and text messaging. Developed the end-to-end systems including the client-side Bulk SMS solution suite, the Web Portals and the backend messaging platform that integrated into the Mobile Networks.

Responsibilities:

• Head of Technology, Software Development, Infrastructure and Delivery
• Designed & developed the multi-tiered messaging gateway, remote client software and web services

Following the acquisition of Datagate, I was task to head the development department for mobile and internet solutions, focusing on emerging Mobile technologies, e-commerce and web services.

Led and managed a small team of developers for a prominent South African Development House. Created South Africa’s first premium rated text message system for sending picture messages and ringtones to the earlier Nokia & Ericsson mobile handsets

Employed as web developer and webmaster for a leading cellular service provider, developing their Internal and External facing websites.

Selected and hired by Andersen Computer Consultants South Africa to consult on SME manufacturing systems, networking and infrastructure.

Hired as the Universities youngest lecturer to teach undergrad and entry level computer science whilst completing a national higher diploma in Computer Science (Full Bursary). Later was hired as the Systems Administrator for the Windows and UNIX computer labs across two locations and three campuses.