We started emporos because we had each watched the same thing happen from different seats: an AI programme that worked in the demo and died in deployment.

Thana (Jay) Groot has spent more than twenty-five years inside the institutions we now serve. He was Senior Executive Vice President and Head of Technology and Data at CIMB Thai, running the bank’s technology end to end: digital and mobile, core banking, cloud, cyber security, data governance and an AI centre of excellence, together with the budget, the vendors and the committees that come with them. Before that he was a Managing Director at Accenture, leading financial-services and banking transformation in Singapore and Thailand, and an Executive Vice President at NTT DATA for Asia Pacific, where he headed digital transformation, technology consulting and the regional financial-services business.

Across those roles, and earlier ones at KPMG Consulting and Deloitte in Japan and at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ in Singapore, he led the programmes banks find hardest: core banking replacement, payments and cash-management platforms, credit and lending journeys, finance and data architecture, robotic process automation, and the change programmes that make them stick. At Deloitte he helped build a new overseas bank from nothing, from the data centre and the settlement links to the regulatory reporting.

He has chaired or sat on IT strategy, IT security, digital banking, risk management and data governance committees, holds the Director Certification and Advanced Audit Committee programmes of the Thai Institute of Directors and the Project Management Professional certification, and has spoken at regional CIO and digital-transformation summits. He has lived and worked in Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong and the UK, and works in English, Japanese and Thai.

Chaiyo (Win) Hoohew has spent his career keeping production data systems running inside London investment firms, where a pipeline that fails overnight is a business problem before it is an engineering one. He was a Market Data Engineer at Capula Investment Management and a Software Engineer at Marshall Wace Asset Management, and in between built product at Seal, an automation and digitisation start-up.

Inside those firms he owned the reliability, throughput and cost of market-data processes; built data onboarding, reconciliation, alerting and monitoring with Python, C#, Airflow, Kafka and Kubernetes; and worked with analysts and data vendors so that the numbers could be trusted. Before finance, he was a Robotics and Automation Engineer at Rolls-Royce, where he programmed robot arms to measure jet-engine components, introduced virtual reality into the engineering process, and delivered robotics programming workshops for engineers and technicians.

He holds an MSc in Computing Science from Imperial College London and a first-class MEng in Aerospace Engineering from Downing College, Cambridge, where he was a Downing College Scholar. He has mentored graduate engineers throughout his career.