Chris Pickering Email Address

Director of Information Technology Operations

Accident Exchange is one of the largest accident management companies in Europe, formed in 2000.

Responsible for all aspects of business technology and IT leadership, taking ownership for information technology spanning 9 sites across the UK, providing business-critical service & support to the business. Focuses on management of IT infrastructure, telephony, servers, networking, EUC, data centres & SDLC. Manages the delivery of 3-tier support for IT-related issues across all 9 sites, including adherence to JML processes & approvals. Engages collaboratively with business end users & decision makers on IT issues. Definition and execution of technical policies & procedures, aligning technology with core business needs. Full remit for managing IT budgets of over £1.5m, with an emphasis on reducing costs and realising value. Leadership, management and motivation of team of up to 30+ professional engineers & development staff. IT purchasing, tender processes and management of support contracts, including KPI metrics and SLAs. Co-ordinates Data security, including penetration testing (grey/white box), cyber protection, and GDPR. Championed the technical onboarding of large strategic business partners as well as taking ownership for all elements of security and data compliance for key contracts. Led business continuity (BCP) & Disaster Recovery (DR) to support 500+ staff & 5,000+ prestige vehicles. Achieved success in migrating the legacy company WAN (MPLS) to an SDWAN (Software Defined Wide Area Network), realising the achievement of major business benefits, cost savings and the agility to grow. Key Contributions and Successes: Created and embedded IT policies and procedures around information security & risk management. Oversees PCI compliance to support online and phone transactions, as well as regulatory demands. Prepares business cases, justification and cost-vs-benefit analysis for IT spending and investments. Migrated existing on-premise ISDN telephony system to leading SIP provider (Vodafone / GAMMA) Transitioned core business staff from desktops to laptops, providing resilience during the pandemic. Project-led migration of the primary data centre into a CoLo environment with zero hours downtime. Moved on-prem call centre to the cloud, removing reliance on hardware gateways & enabling agility. Enabled omni-channel communication to the business via WhatsApp, LiveChat & IVR based robotics.