CHIPS - Key Persons
Deon has more than 18 years of banking and insurance experience in the fields of compliance, credit, risk management and capital management and is currently the CEO of Omnea (PTY) Ltd.
Deon previously held senior management positions with Nedbank, Standard Bank, Liberty and Barclays Africa. A key feature of his career revolved around conceptualising, designing, building and implementing methodologies, processes and systems to address complex problems and/or meet regulatory requirements in respect of capital management, the risk management life-cycle, risk data aggregation and risk reporting.
Deon has significant experience in the regulatory environment governing the financial services sector and was a member of the Financial Services Conduct Authority's steering committee responsible for the development and implementation of the Solvency Assessment and Management (SAM) supervisory approach for prudential regulation. He was also responsible for leading the Liberty Group's multi-year project for the successful implementation of the SAM regulations. Deon is a CFA Charterholder (CFA), a Certified Financial Risk Manager (FRM), an admitted Advocate of the High Court of South Africa and he holds degrees in commerce and law from the University of Pretoria.
Philip has more than 25 years' experience in payment systems innovation, both in South Africa and internationally. He spent 22 years of his career at the South African Reserve Bank where he provided information technology solutions and in the latter part of his tenure was also responsible for the national payment system, co-founded and was at the helm of Perago for 10 years and has been the chairman of Trustlink for 13 years.
In the nineties (GM: Business Systems and Technology at the Reserve Bank at the time), he led a banking industry initiative to modernise the South African National Payment System. This ground-breaking exercise introduced, amongst others, a real-time payment system (SAMOS) between South African banks. The project also resulted in the promulgation of the first South African National Payment System Act, a self-regulating structure (PASA) to regulate the payments industry, as well as opening up competition in the provision of payment services to non-banks.
In 1999, he co-founded Perago Financial System Enablers (Pty) Ltd to develop and implement real-time financial infrastructure in central banks worldwide - the software developed by Perago today serves as the key financial infrastructure component of the financial systems of countries in Scandinavia, Africa, the Middle East and more recently Australasia.
He negotiated an agreement with SWIFT (the de facto international payment messaging provider) for Perago to become the regional SWIFT business partner for sub-Saharan Africa and established the Trustlink Service Bureau providing SWIFT access and services to financial institutions and corporates in 26 countries.
In 2004 he received a 'Chief Information Officer of the Decade' award from the Computer Society of South Africa (CSSA) and Computerweek Strategist, in 2006 a 'Certificate of Excellence as private sector CIO' from the South African Department of Communications and in 2016 a 'Lifetime Achievement Award' from the Payment Association of South Africa (PASA).
In 2016 he founded the Swiss-domiciled CHIPS AG to focus on the development of immediate value, peer-to-peer payment solutions for consumers and business.