ITB Summer Edition - Flipbook - Page 16
Summer Special
T H E S T R AT E G I S T // J A N N AT M A Q B O O L C PA
“ I’M PASSION DRIVEN – ALWAYS WANTING TO MAKE A
DIFFERENCE. NOT ONLY AM I A WOMAN IN TECH, BUT I’M
ALSO AN ETHNIC WOMAN IN TECH. I’M PROUD OF THAT.”
MULTITASKING PRO
Maqbool says her drive probably goes back to her
heritage and the need to adapt her North Indian
background to a very “Australian” part of Australia.
She was born in Coffs Harbour in northern New South
Wales to a Punjabi family, which had arrived in the country
two generations earlier, in the mid-1890s, as cane cutters,
later moving to Grafton, New South Wales. Her father,
known as “Milky”, cut cane in his early years, and then
moved into a labouring role and finally became a safety
officer on public works projects. He was entirely a “selfmade man”.
“He knew that he had to make sure his children were
well educated,” Maqbool says.
Her father was a well-known local character. “When
he was younger, he taught the plantation owners basic
Punjabi, so they could communicate with migrating Indian
workers.” She adds that, growing up, there were a number
of Indian families in the area that had become very well
established over several generations. The first Sikh temple
in Australia was built in Woolgoolga, just over 40 minutes
south of Coffs Harbour, and since then the Sikh Heritage
Museum of Australia has opened at the site of her uncle’s
old Indian restaurant in the same beachside town.
Milky’s children, including Jannat, were all naturalborn engineers, in the days when kids used to take
things apart and reinvent them in the back yard.
“Back in the day, it was just natural curiosity that ruled
our lives. We had to learn how to fix things. We had to
wire stuff, we had to fix TVs. We all learnt the technical
ropes. We all knew how to use soldering irons!”
If there was a moment when she found her niche,
it might have been in 1985 when, as a 10-year-old at
Grafton Primary School, she discovered the Commodore
64 computer. Just as her older brother used to put car
parts together to make bespoke vehicles, Maqbool shrugs
at the suggestion of that it is unusual to think of a child
learning a computer language in a country town before
the word “coding” entered our everyday vocabulary.
For Maqbool, adaptation to circumstances has been
the rule rather than the exception. While completing a
correspondence degree in financial administration at the
University of New England and living in Sydney in 1996,
she landed a job at Mercantile Mutual, now ING Bank.
What started out as a mostly data entry role
morphed into something far more technical. As a
superannuation fund administrator in the era when
there were fears about the Y2K bug, Maqbool took on
the role of testing systems for what many at the time
feared might be “IT Armageddon”.
16 ITB January 2021
Top: Aerial view of Waikato River,
Hamilton, New Zealand.
Above: The vice-chancellor’s residence
and administration office at the University
of New England, New South Wales.
FINTECH FUTURE
TECHNOLOGY
PIONEER
Wherever Jannat
Maqbool CPA has gone in
the world of accounting,
she has been drawn into
the technology that was
evolving around the
industry. Maqbool, the
maverick accountant with
a head for technology,
understood it all.
When she and her
husband moved from
Australia to New
Zealand in the early
2000s, she worked in a
systems accounting role
at Motor Trade Finances
in Dunedin. Yet again,
she was drafted in for
her “other skills”. Not
long afterwards,
Maqbool wrote a macro
to reconcile a new
financial system with
the old one. When the
managing director
asked who was
responsible for the
systems migration,
he was flabbergasted.
Maqbool was soon
sitting next door to the
boss. “It was a finance
company moving into
becoming a finance
technology company,”
she recalls. She soon
was part of a growing
team of people that was
analysing and presenting
data to gain new insights
into the financial needs,
habits and vicissitudes of
customers and the
group’s 680 dealers
spread across the
country. “We worked out
who bought finance,
how much they needed
to borrow, when they
were most likely to
default, and what
percentage we should
lend to them. We also
talked to dealers to
understand what their
biggest pain point was
in the lending process,”
she explains.
From there, Maqbool
and others built an online
finance origination system
and credit risk pricing
model based on the data
profiling the group had
compiled. It was data
management decades
ahead of its time.
“We could combine
data inputted through the
origination system with
third-party data feeds
to evaluate clients and
come up with a base
rate for finance.”
Maqbool had seen the future that was FinTech and
never looked back.
In the intervening years, Maqbool completed her CPA
qualification, which she says “just seemed to be the next
logical thing to do” because of its technology strand,
which other equivalent accounting certificates lacked
at the time.
Maqbool joined Wintec to supervise IT student
projects with industry. She then moved into a
lecturing position at the institute, teaching accounting
information systems, and her work there has also led her
to a number of research and community projects with
external partners.
More recently, Maqbool was the operations manager
at CultivateIT, where she collaborated with a wider
group of stakeholders, including the region’s economic
development agency, Te Waka, to develop a region-wide
digital strategy and support tech sector activity.
Realising the potential of AI as a transformational
technology across sectors, Maqbool has recently
taken up the position of director – development and
partnerships with the AI researchers at the University
of Waikato, connecting their expertise and student
researchers with industry and supporting the ongoing
development of New Zealand’s existing strength in the
field of machine learning and AI.
With Ecosystm, she collates research and provides
advice in the area of IoT, agritech and FinTech for
the Asia-Pacific region, and presents insights at
international events.
As a board member at NZ Tech, Maqbool works with
the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment,
alongside other stakeholders, to develop and support
the digital technologies industry transformation plan.
However, for Maqbool, it is equally important to stress
that her mission is about developing the sector to
support community wellbeing, which is the focus of
her role in the smart cities and digital inclusion spaces.
click here
to borrow
FinTech
Innovation
from the
CPA Australia
library
Maqbool also completed a master’s degree in digital
business at the University of Waikato in early 2020,
for which she was awarded a scholarship. It is no
surprise that, for her thesis, she has chosen to
interview banks, regulatory authorities, start-ups
and incubators to understand opportunities for
collaboration between incumbent corporations and
FinTech companies in New Zealand to drive greater
and more inclusive FinTech innovation.
“I like that I get to influence what’s going on with the
academic side – the research expertise as well as the
pipeline of talent coming through – and also support
industry by driving tech innovation as an enabler.”
The pace of change, she says, means the tech
industry must have graduates “who can hit the ground
running” and “turning ROI tomorrow”. She has not
forgotten the accountancy students either. “Everything
is automated. Accountants don’t have to do the basic
numbers reconciling any more – that’s all done for
them. The students have to know how to work with
the systems and focus on advisory and supporting
businesses with information that adds greater value.”
There is a greater social side to all this. Businesses
and the students do connect in Waikato.
“They have to be networked locally, because we
are in the regions, and the tech ecosystem must be
able to support itself,” she says. “Both Wintec and the
University of Waikato do a fantastic job in this space. It
is important that all the pieces align – that’s the first and
foremost thing – and that is why I enjoy the different
roles I play in, hopefully, bringing it all together more,”
she says.
“It wouldn’t work, I think, with one full-time role.”
Like other innovators, Maqbool is thriving in a portfolio
approach to her career and community contributions. It
is worth remembering she is also a bona fide academic,
not just working on designing programs and teaching
students, but also pursuing academic studies herself as
a lifelong learner.
Maqbool was recently appointed as the foundational
chair at the Waikato Intercultural Fund. She is also on the
board of trustees at the Hamilton Multicultural Services
Trust and the Web Access Waikato Trust.
“I’m passion driven – always wanting to make a
difference. Not only am I a woman in tech, but I’m also
an ethnic woman in tech. I’m proud of that. There are so
many different pockets of cool things. I want to be there
for it all.”
intheblack.com January 2021 17
