Richard Robinson

Richard Robinson is an honours graduate with over 20 years experience delivering quality IT solutions, the last 16 of which have been focused on general insurance. Richard has held a variety of roles ranging from application developer through to Chief Technology Officer and has held a seat on the operational board of a software house. Richard has extensive experience of all aspects of the development lifecycle and has managed multi-disciplinary teams distributed over several regions. In addition to having an honours degree in Business Computing, Richard is also a Chartered Engineer, a Certified Information Technology Practitioner and a Member of the British Computer Society.

Richard's first position was as a graduate with Hoskyns (later to become part of Cap Gemini Sogeti). Through this role Richard provided consultancy for a range of clients including Swiss Bank Corporation, Prudential, Iveco-Ford Trucks and SE-Gas. In 1994 Richard joined Direct Line and was involved in redeveloping the rating engine for property insurance to improve performance and add additional functionality. Richard was then seconded to the newly formed Privilege Insurance, a non-standard sister company to Direct Line, where he was responsible for developing a policy administration system to manage all aspects of quote through to new business and subsequent amendments.

In 1996 Richard joined the HUON Corporation and worked in London as an application developer, initially providing support for clients in Sweden and South Africa. Following these initial assignments Richard identified the potential to create a new mechanism for managing the application of renewal transactions and produced a proposal for this. This proposal was approved and the Next Activity architecture was introduced to manage renewal cycles. Richard then identified the potential for a business user controlled, table driven, rules engine to further control the renewal cycle. Richard then established and managed a team, consisting of US and UK resources, that was responsible for the development and support of all renewals and rules code. Following a restructure of the development group Richard then established and managed a team dedicated to developing and testing enhancements for the International Base system of The HUON Solution. In 2000 Richard was then appointed to the position of Batch International Architect, with specific responsibility for renewals and rules.

In 2001 Richard became Chief Technology Officer of the HUON Corporation and assumed a position on the Operational Board. Richard then produced a design for an architectural change to the core product that would reduce implementation and upgrade costs and increase system flexibility. This change was approved by the board and Richard then programme managed development teams in the UK, US and Australia to apply these changes. Later in 2001 the HUON Corporation was taken over by Innovation Group and Richard was appointed to the position of SVP for Release Management, responsible for requirements gathering, documentation, testing and installation of all group products. Richard left Innovation Group at the end of 2002.

In 2003 Richard was engaged by Innovation Group as a consultant to create versions of renewals and rules that would work with their services version of The HUON Solution, known as Innovation Policy. Reporting directly to the CTO of Innovation Group Richard liaised with Innovation Group's client base for the new product to deliver product solutions for both policy and membership administration. Richard completed this engagement in 2007, at which point he formed Exploiting Technology to provide independent consultancy.

The HUON Solution and Innovation Policy are trademarks of The Innovation Group (EMEA) Limited.