Expert in leveraging Emerging Technologies for Change
Creative, unconventional thinker and speaker, experienced in personal and enterprise transformation through championing change and leveraging emerging technologies. Dáire has worked as an interlocutor between business and technology for over 30 years; his gift is an ability to grasp and articulate complex, abstract concepts and to deliver results though successfully communicating them in an intelligible, light, relevant, and approachable manner.
Biography
Dáire Lawlor has over 30 years’ experience and a strong background in IT, Operations and the Business in the tech and financial services sectors where he has built up a depth of knowledge in assimilating and exploiting emerging technologies.
His path has been an unconventional one, never having gone to college and learning from experience and copious numbers of mistakes made since the 1980s when he performed with a number of bands while also working as a commis chef, advertising copywriter, sales person, and English teacher before being introduced to technology and distributed workflows in 1990 when he joined a software localisation firm as a QA engineer.
He quickly graduated to engineering and went on to build and lead engineering teams, ultimately offshore for a year in Bangalore in 1996. Upon his return he transitioned to project management and rose to join the Leadership Team as Global Head of Evaluation and Planning in 1998.
During his time there he pioneered distributed workflows, contributed to the development of Machine Translation technology (the precursor to Natural Language Processing), and was one of the 1st people in Ireland to work with email, laptops, HTML, web browsers, and the internet and benefited from an exit in 2000 when the firm was sold.
Dáire then established a web and localisation consultancy business before being asked to take over as managing director of a localisation firm in the UK in 2004 and then headhunted back to Ireland by a former client to take on a massive transformation programme with a global Japanese hedge fund administration business on the basis that, while he knew nothing about finance, he was adept at finding order in chaos.
To achieve the goals of the ambitious programme it was necessary for him to learn the complex business of hedge fund administration while also winning the hearts and minds of its sceptical practitioners to deliver on an ambitious and far reaching transformation.
Thus began the next phase of his career in financial services successfully servicing blue chip clients, most recently as Managing Director and Head of State Street Ireland’s Consulting Services Group, where he was responsible for business liaison with IT, fintech and innovation, client onboarding and product development, business transformation and remediation, and professional services.
In 2020 Dáire founded Interwoven Ltd., an advisory and professional services company, offering a variety of professional services, operational scaling, go to market, and research services to firms and funds looking to exploit emerging technologies. He is a very active member of the Irish Funds Sustainability, Skills and Technology Steering Group, the ICT SkillNet Innovation Panel, the Blockchain Ireland Steering Group, and the Vigitrust Advisory Board and has a strong network in the funds, sustainability, legal, healthtech, insurance, and emerging technology sectors.
Topics
Innovation
Drawing on his experience as an innovator in roles with a variety of fast growing start-ups and global institutional businesses, Dáire can speak with authority on how to foster, harness, manage, and protect creativity in a business environment to deliver real results.
Emerging Technologies
From being one of the 1st people in Ireland with an email address to sitting on the steering group of Blockchain Ireland, Dáire has a long track record of cutting through the hype to identify and exploit the possibilities afforded by new technologies while focussing on the reality that business demands solutions, not technology.
Personal Reinvention
Dáire’s path has not been a conventional one, never having gone to college and having learnt his trade through a very broad span of experience in variety of industries and roles. He can reflect on a narrative thread stretching back to his time as a commis chef and musician and how he leveraged those formative experiences to rise in the corporate world and to inform his unique perspective.
Digital Assets/Blockchain/DLT
Dáire 1st got involved with Blockchain when he led a Distributed Ledger Proof of Concept exercise for the Irish Funds Industry association in 2016. Dáire advises the funds industry and crypto eco system and, while he maintains a healthy scepticism regarding the extremes of the coin markets, he remains enthusiastic about the enormous potential for the digitisation of finance to democratise finance, deliver efficiencies and transparency to business, protection to the consumer, and real time accurate data to both the
marketplace and the regulators.
Operational, Personal, and Digital Transformation
Devising, implementing and exploiting change requires a blend of persuasion, poetry, and practicality to succeed. Standing on the shoulders of giants, Dáire has acquired his wisdom over 30 years, learning from myriad mistakes, meeting 100s of commitments and delivering the occasional triumph along the way.
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