ETZ end of year review from CEO – Nick Woodward

A year of positive and significant change with lots of exciting initiatives planned for 2019

With the year end rapidly approaching, now is the time to reflect on the current year and take stock of what we set out to do a year ago and how we did against what we had planned.
More importantly we have invested into our community and continue to grow our London and Gold Coast offices. We have built a loyal and motivated team to service the needs of our customers. Our customers and employees are our greatest assets and I hope that we have reached the high standard we set ourselves to serve you.
We are passionate about technology and are proud to invest, create and evolve innovative solutions that facilitate your needs. It’s what drives the new digital economy. I am happy to say that we have improved our service offering by moving to the cloud which is hosted by the Microsoft Azure platform. The aim being that the service to you is a more reliable responsive system.  Well done to our very talented in-house technical team of developers and dev ops, without whom our creative solutions would not be delivered –  thank you team.
We broke new ground for a technology company by hiring our new in-house Legal Team to handle the rapidly changing compliance requirements for ourselves and our customers. From the GDPR, through to IR35 contractual requirements, as well as the eIDAS Regulation.  I’m not a big fan of red tape but the GDPR is a force for good and data protection and privacy is a passion of mine.
Special thank you to Solange Semedo our Head of Legal and recently appointed Chief Operating Officer. Solange single handedly, implemented our GDPR policy in April 2018, with only one month to meet the May deadline. If that was not enough, Solange set up our internal Fraud and Misconduct Unit and secured the criminal conviction of a former employee who had engaged in fraudulent activities within our business. Expect to see more high profile white collar criminal convictions during 2019 as we spin out our growing Legal and Regulatory Team into my latest venture, a start-up legal services business with an emphasis on private prosecutions and advisory services to the technology and recruitment sectors.
It is anticipated that 2019 will be our greatest year yet. There are so many great financial centres globally, all vying to bring great companies to the investor market awash with funds and looking for technology investments – watch this space.
Finally, we are planning to do something sensational, disruptive, innovative and the first of its kind for a technology platform, even beyond the recruitment sector. I can’t tell you what that is yet but it will be a serious game changer for the digital economy.
I would like to take this opportunity to wish you all the best for the holiday season and hope you all get to spend quality time with family and loved ones. May you have a fantastic holiday and all of us here at ETZ wish you a happy, healthy, and prosperous New Year 2019!
Nick Woodward