Richard Lord is the Regional Chief Information Officer for HSB Commercial Bank in Asia Pacific. He and his team are responsible for the operational infrastructure and delivery of market-leading technology innovation for the bank.

Richard has more than 30 years of experience, including global technology leadership roles in the advertising industry, and 17 years as an entrepreneur and business owner.

Richard is an active advocate of diversity and addressing bias and discrimination in the workplace.

As Chief Information Officer, Sami is responsible for delivering high-quality, reliable and performance-enhancing technology services across Bupa. Having joined Bupa more than 12 years ago, Sami has held a number of technical and senior leadership roles across various Information Services teams, where he has driven significant performance and service improvements for the business, our customers and our people. Since becoming CIO in February 2016, Sami has led the transformation of Information Services to become more customer-focused, agile, collaborative and efficient, which has improved the colleague and customer experience as reflected by significant improvements in employee and colleague Net Promoter Scores. Sami was recently recognised externally for his track record as a transformational leader making a significant business impact, when he was placed in the Top 3 CIOs in Australia, as judged by CIO50. In addition to more than 30 years of information technology experience at a variety of industries spanning multiple continents, Sami’s qualifications include a Bachelor of Computer Engineering, a Master of Business Administration and a Master of Quality Management.

Tanya is a Business Transformation Executive with a demonstrated ability to develop new business ideas and successfully implement them across a business. She is a leader who is enthusiastic about driving change and organisational growth. Having been in senior roles for over twenty years, she has experience working with Board Directors, Executive teams and regulators, to drive change across industries including Pharmaceutical, Financial Services, Technology, Retail and Property, Federal Government and Utilities. Tanya is currently the Chief Transformation Officer at Alinta Energy, overseeing an enterprise wide transformation to scale up the business to meet ambitious growth targets whilst also meeting evolving regulatory requirements and intense market competition. Prior to Alinta, Tanya developed the digital and data strategy for Austrade as their Chief Digital Officer.   Tanya holds an MBA from Macquarie Graduate School of Management (MGSM), is a graduate of the Company Directors course, Australian Institute of Company Directors (GAICD) and is a member of the Institute of Engineering & Technology (IET).

Kshira Saagar (Shee-Rah Sa-Ga) has been with the Analytics/Decision Sciences industry for almost a decade now having worked across Americas, Asia, Europe and more importantly Australia. The bulk of his work has been focussed on developing solutions for the Data Science and Analytics problem spaces of the Retail, Telecom and Insurance marketing departments at some of the leading Fortune 100 clients. In his other roles, he has also enabled decision making through data for clients from the Media, Healthcare, Aviation, Logistics and FMCG organisations. Kshira believes in making data everyone’s job at an organisation and not have it just as a specialty role.

In his current role at Global Fashion Group (the parent company of THE ICONIC), as the Director of Analytics and Data Science, he’s responsible for enabling data driven smart-decision making across 14 different countries within the fashion e-commerce space. Previously at Datalicious & prior to that at Fairfax, he was responsible for institutionalising data-driven analytics across the company’s core competencies and building new-age analytical products for the organisation.

I started my career as a developer, moved into data as my area of specialty and then found myself as a project manager and ultimately a leader. I’ve worked mainly in Australia but also had a 3-year stint in Asia. These experiences have developed me so that I am most effective in an environment with a focus on continuous improvement and get excited by leading teams through wholesale transformation.

As Head of IT, I have full responsibility for corporate IT for Channel 7 and Pacific Magazines, Australia wide. This includes a team of 40 people that are distributed across Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. The team supports a user base of approximately 3500 across 13 sites. The role manages teams that have responsibility for ensuring operational stability, providing end user support and managing the delivery of projects for the business.

David Hackshall is the Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Cochlear Ltd, a leader in cochlea implant technology that supports over 500,000 people with hearing loss around the world. Since commencing his role in July 2015, David has overseen the organisation’s global IT capability with a focus on innovating technology to further improve the Cochlear recipient’s journey. Based in Sydney, David operates in a global capacity with operations throughout Asia, Europe and the US. Under David’s supervision the Cochlear technology function has undertaken a material restructure whilst delivering a number of customer facing and internal cornerstone applications. David was also recently selected by his peers to be included in the top 10 CIOs across Australia and New Zealand. David has over 20 years’ of experience in driving technological transformation spanning differing industry sectors. He has worked in some of Australia’s leading companies including logistics, financial services and now medical devices. David holds both a Master of Information Technology Management and MBA from Macquarie University.