Tim Thurman new CDO at Paysafe Group

Former ASX tech boss Tim Thurman, has been headhunted by global payments provider, Paysafe Group to fill a newly-created chief digital officer role.

Thurman, who quit his CIO post at the Australian Securities Exchange in December, will start work at Paysafe’s Montreal, Canada office at the end of the month.

Thurman, who hails from Toronto, will lead a global IT team of up to 1,000 staff – including CIOs, CTOs and CSIOs – and report to Paysafe president and CEO, Joel Leonoff.

Speaking to CIO Australia, Thurman said over the years, Paysafe has grown over many years through acquisition globally and has many dispersed technology components to its business.

Thurman will help the organisation rationalise these IT systems to drive efficiencies, much like the work he has completed at the ASX in recent years where he was instrumental in executing the ASX’s $50 million technology transformation strategy. Under this initiative, the ASX has replaced every piece of its core technology, including four clearing systems, six risk systems, and all the underlying applications that support them.

“They [Paysafe] wanted to bring someone in who has done that [tech transformation] before,” he said.

The highly regulated payment and exchange markets are very similar in their requirement for systems that support high velocity, low latency transactions, said Thurman.

“The [CDO] role as created to bring it [technology] all together. They are growing up pretty quick and the board has a mandate to keep growing the business – their agenda is to be one of the biggest [payment providers] in the world so they want to make sure that the technology can align to that.”

Thurman also recently resigned as chair of the Government Advisory Board for the NSW Data Analytics Centre (DAC). In this role, he provided leadership and technical guidance to the DAC to ensure data sharing between the government agencies was efficient and strategic.

Prior to the ASX, Thurman was head of information technology at Credit Suisse Canada. He also served as head of client development and sales at Alpha Trading Systems and as VP and director, Alternative Execution Group at investment business, TD Newcrest.