Australian retailers built up archives of scanned licences and passports for reasons that made sense at a counter. After deleting 1.7 million of ours, I think the default should be to sight a document, record that we did, and keep nothing else.
29 per cent through online channels, plus 156 stores and a commercial division
Technology colleagues led
430
Engineering, store systems, infrastructure, cyber security, data and service delivery
Worst-case breach exposure, mid-2025
1.9m
People affected by a worst-case breach of customer systems, down from about 6.1 million in 2022
In electronics retail I judge technology by what still works on Boxing Day morning and by how little customer data we have left to lose.
I am the chief technology officer of Halvorne Retail Group, a fictional ASX-listed retailer of televisions, laptops, phones, whitegoods and kitchen appliances. We earned A$3.1 billion of revenue in the year to June 2026 from 156 stores, our website and app, and a commercial division that fits out new apartments and offices. Twenty-nine per cent of our sales now begin online, and a large share of them land in the five weeks between Black Friday and the first week of January, when every system we run is tested by customers rather than by us.
I have spent twenty-seven years in retail and payments technology, almost all of it close to the moment a customer pays or collects. I wrote till software for a Queensland department-store group, helped recover an English catalogue retailer from a replatforming that failed seven weeks before Christmas, ran engineering at a payment gateway and kept an online marketplace standing through its sale events. Halvorne hired me in April 2020 as its first chief technology officer, after its website had failed for more than three hours on Boxing Day 2019.
My work rests on two convictions that sometimes cost money in the short run. Every change to a retail platform should be reversible before the next peak, even if that means running old and new systems side by side for years. And the customer data a retailer does not keep cannot be stolen, so deletion belongs in the security budget beside firewalls and monitoring. I also try to be honest about what software should not do, which is why our customer-service assistant answers delivery questions and hands every faulty-product conversation to a person.
A platform replaced without a lost peak
We retired a 2009 commerce application through 31 reversible releases over 34 months, for A$71 million against a A$88 million single-cutover proposal. Since 2022 no Black Friday or Boxing Day outage has lasted longer than four minutes.
Trading through a gateway failure
When our main payment gateway failed for 47 minutes on Black Friday 2024, a pre-agreed deferred-authorisation mode captured 14,300 orders worth A$5.8 million. Of those, 96.1 per cent were charged within four hours, and confirmed fraud cost A$41,000.
1.7 million identity images deleted
We stopped photographing licences in February 2023 and deleted 1.7 million stored identity-document images, keeping 2,300 under legal hold. Our worst-case breach exposure fell from about 6.1 million people to about 1.9 million.
An assistant measured by whether customers return
Our customer-service assistant resolves 31 per cent of chat and messaging contacts without a recontact within seven days and saves about A$3.6 million a year. Fault, refund and warranty questions always reach a person.
Current focus
I am leading the replacement of the point-of-sale and store systems in all 156 stores, due to finish in mid-2027, with each store able to trade offline for a full day. Alongside it, I am preparing our customer systems for the next stage of privacy reform, including the requirement to tell customers when computer programs make or substantially assist decisions that significantly affect them.
Conversations I welcome
I am not seeking another executive role while the store programme is unfinished. I would welcome one non-executive directorship outside retail, joining an audit and risk committee and, where a board has one, chairing a technology or cyber committee after a year. I can give 24 days a year with the Halvorne board's consent. I also accept a few speaking invitations on peak resilience, privacy and customer-service AI.
Beyond the page
The record behind the perspective.
In the boardroom
Tessellan Digital Access LimitedNon-executive director (unpaid), not-for-profit company without shareholders · 2021–present
Formation
Bachelor of Engineering (Software)Lindqvale Institute of Technology · 1999
Graduate Certificate in Cyber Security, part-timeArdencliff University · 2019
Tristan tells the committee what went wrong in testing, not only what went wrong in production. When a restore test overran by fifteen hours, we heard it from him, with the cause and a date for the fix, before anyone thought to ask. That is the instinct I would want in any director.
Harriet GrandisonFictional independent non-executive director and chair of the audit and risk committee, Halvorne Retail Group LimitedThe full record ↗
Contact
I am not seeking another executive role while the store programme is unfinished. I would welcome one non-executive directorship outside retail, joining an audit and risk committee and, where a board has one, chairing a technology or cyber committee after a year. I can give 24 days a year with the Halvorne board's consent. I also accept a few speaking invitations on peak resilience, privacy and customer-service AI.