Brian Barrett

“The way I value my career is by looking at how many people I’ve nurtured in the company. It’s about instilling confidence and self-belief.”

“I think tech people tend to be a bit introverted, to be perfectly honest,” says self-confessed techie Brian, who admits that as a child he enjoyed dismantling his electronic toys with a screwdriver to see how they worked. “You can see that a businessperson immediately wants to interact with people, that’s the first thing that comes to their mind, but a techie person just wants to sit and do their code.”

But after more than 20 years and 200-plus projects at Temenos, it’s clear that Brian—who started out studying maritime engineering in England and Ireland—has overcome any introvert tendencies himself. “There’s barely a bank in the world that hasn’t had me at its front door,” he admits. He’s also made a point of encouraging others to come out of their shells in the name of delivering for clients.

“At Temenos we do code. It’s in our DNA. But we do code because we have a client, and that’s got to be the end game. So, we need to deliver on that,” he says.

Over the years Brian has sought to bolster soft skills in the many Temenosians he’s encountered, confident that their technical skills are already a given.

“It’s about how to talk to CEOs, how to understand the company structure, how to deliver the message you’re giving. Are you going to present that Excel spreadsheet with 2,000 values on it to the CEO of the Bank of England? I mean, maybe not. Maybe he just wants to see one number.

“The way I value my career is by looking at how many people I’ve nurtured in the company. I know the people who’ve come under my umbrella and I’d say almost all of them are still in the company, and I’d really like to think that I’ve contributed to that. It’s about instilling confidence and self-belief.”

It’s a worthwhile task for Brian because he sees Temenos as an inspiring place to be and one where nothing stands still. He’s helped the company transition to offering Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) after its early move into Cloud. Where once a project could require 20 to 30 developers on site for several years, now it can be delivered by a remote team in a matter of months, a trend accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic.

He also relishes the culture of the company, bringing people together from around the world with the common objective of delivering for the client.

“It’s fantastic to see how different cultures and different languages can come together when you have a common objective.”

“We span the globe. You might be from India or Uzbekistan or the US, it doesn’t matter,” says Brian. “It’s fantastic to see how different cultures and different languages can come together when you have a common objective. It’s very humbling and it’s something I hope I can continue to contribute to as a Founding Fellow, enabling people to step up and play their part.”