Ann: CR8 hires former MetLife Head of Innovation, boosts AI team, page-2

Cre8tek Secures High Profile Chief Commercial Officer & Bolsters Flamingo’s Artificial Intelligence Team
PERTH, 6 JANUARY 2017: Cre8tek Limited (“Cre8tek” or “the Company”) (ASX: CR8) is pleased to announce that it has secured high profile Australian innovation, strategy and operations specialist Brenton Charnley as the Company’s Chief Commercial Officer, as well as Dr Parisa Kouchaki, who joins the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning team of the Company’s subsidiary, Flamingo Customer Experience Inc.
BRENTON CHARNLEY:
Brenton, who in 2012 was identified as one of Australia's top 50 emerging leaders, has over 12 years’ experience helping entrepreneurs, teams and corporate executives embrace new ways of thinking and doing business. Before joining Cre8tek, Brenton was Head of Innovation at MetLife Insurance Australia, one of the largest global providers of insurance, annuities, and employee benefit programs, with 90 million customers in over 60 countries worldwide.
At MetLife, Brenton was responsible for embedding innovation within the organisation and driving improvement of MetLife’s customer experience journey and new products. Prior to joining MetLife, Brenton spent eight years with KPMG Australia, 3 years of which were spent as an Innovation Manager based in Melbourne. During his tenure there he also became global program manager for elevate61, KPMG and Advances’ start-up accelerator program helping to scale Australian startups to the US.
As an Innovation Manager at KPMG, Brenton also assisted privately owned businesses and government organisations along their innovation journey through advice across innovation, customer and digital strategies, innovation practices and culture. He also worked closely with high growth, high-end tech companies, start-ups and entrepreneurs assisting them on their growth trajectory through business advice and innovation, technology and funding strategies.
Brenton is the founder of Insurtech Sydney, a progressive organisation whose focus is to harness technology, share ideas, network and drive collaboration and innovation within the insurance ecosystem in Australia. Brenton is also a qualified chartered accountant, holds degrees from the University of South Australia, and has studied innovation at both Stanford University and the University of Oxford.
As Chief Commercial Officer, Brenton will lead strategy and new business activities and concurrently lead the design and alignment of Flamingo operations and finances to execute on the Company’s aggressive growth plans both in Australia and the US.
Cre8tek CEO Dr Catriona Wallace said: “In hiring Brenton, Cre8tek has acquired the perfect combination of commercial, finance, innovation, corporate and InsurTech skills for our growth and scale plans. Brenton’s focus, as part of the executive team, will be to help lead the Company and Flamingo in achieving its commercial goals in the US, Australian and emerging markets.”
Brenton commented: "I am excited to be joining Cre8tek, and leading the commercial direction of a progressive and innovative company like Flamingo in one of the most promising areas of technology. Catriona and the team have significant traction to date, both locally and globally, and I am looking forward to working with the team to continue this success and help scale Flamingo."
DR PARISA KOUCHAKI
The Company also welcomes Dr Parisa Kouchaki who joins the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning team of Flamingo lead by Chief Data Scientist, Dr Jack Elliot. Dr Kouchaki’s initial focus areas will be the development and commercialisation of Rosie’s (Flamingo’s Cognitive Virtual Assistant
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software) Natural Language Processor and Decision Maker components, and the delivery and provision of analysis and insight.
Dr Kouchaki is a professional data scientist with a deep commercial intellectual curiosity. Before joining Flamingo Dr Kouchaki was a Research Associate at AtCor Medical, who develop products for clinical use that assess the physiological status and function of the human cardiovascular system. There, she both developed new products and improved current products using data driven decision making and insight via the application of data visualisation, statistical and analytical modelling and applying a number of machine learning algorithms.
Dr Kouchaki has also driven deep analysis of acquisition funnels to drive real commercial improvements at eCommerce development business DHD, using customer profile analysis, shopping behaviour analysis and enhancing the eCommerce overview using Google Analytics data.
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ABOUT CRE8TEK
Cre8tek (ASX: CR8) is a listed company that invests in pioneering technology solutions, with a particular focus on software marketing solutions, application software, communication software, SaaS, online social networking services, and security and encryption. Cre8tek acquired Global Agenda Technologies Pty Ltd (Agenda) in January 2016 and recently acquired high profile Australian Fintech business Flamingo Customer Experience Inc. in November 2016.
ABOUT FLAMINGO:
Based in NYC and Sydney, in the emerging Conversational Commerce field, Flamingo is an Enterprise SaaS company, which provides a Cognitive Virtual Assistant (AI) platform designed for selling complex financial products online. Flamingo’s Cognitive Virtual Assistant or Chatbot is called Rosie. Flamingo is one of Gartner’s ‘Cool Vendors’ and clients include large financial services firms.
www.flamingo.ai
For further information, investor or media enquires, please contact:
Michael Wills – Flamingo Email: [email protected]
Phone: 0468-385-208