Andrew Vorster (or AV as he is better known), is a passionate technologist and innovator who has spent his professional career in the space in between the IT department and the business, leading innovation initiatives and acting as technology translator by interpreting the needs of the business and providing foresight into the implications of current and future technology capability, in order to influence innovation, strategic direction and future vision.

He has been in the IT industry since the early ‘80s when, while still completing his degree at university, he started his own consulting company helping organisations understand and exploit the potential of the explosion of personal computing and the then nascent Internet in South Africa.

On moving to the UK in 1997, he initially joined Nestlé where he was responsible for introducing a number of ground breaking applications and innovations before taking on the CTO role in 1999 for a dotcom start-up owned by the Guardian Media group, adding a wealth of online and digital experience through the early boom-and-bust days of the original dotcom bubble.

He joined Visa International at the beginning of 2005 as the VP, Head of Technology / CTO for the Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa (CEMEA) region where he gained global exposure to the payments industry and became exposed to the diverse challenges across individual regions. As the chair of a number of global committees within Visa, Andrew rapidly gained a reputation for fresh thinking and being a catalyst for innovation and change, by proposing pragmatic solutions to complex problems, thereby getting all parties to embrace the potential of new and emerging technologies.

AV moved to Visa Europe in 2007 in order to establish the Technology Research and Development department within the Technology Office where, as VP of Technology Research, he was responsible for global scanning and scouting and establishing the R&D Centre of Excellence which encompassed the entire innovation process from ideation through incubation and proposition validation.

After delivering numerous new innovations and hundreds of keynotes and workshops to audiences ranging from 10 to over 2,000 in size, he left Visa Europe in 2014 in order to help a broader range of organisations write their own story of the future.

These days, he spends the bulk of his time scanning and scouting for the TIPS – Technologies, Innovations, Patents and Start-ups, behind the trends that are driving new business models and shaping consumer behaviour.

As an Innovation Catalyst he works with organisations of all sizes, from well established multi-nationals to SME's and start-ups across the world, in order to help them envisage the range of possible futures fuelled, accelerated and enabled by technology by "showing them how" to THINK and BE more innovative in everything they do.

He is a published author with a (slowly) growing collection of books for your bookshelf.

Troubled by the rising global unemployment resulting from the COVID19 pandemic, AV and a former colleague from his Visa days (John Downing) co-founded a Social Enterprise called NZIRA (meaning "the path from one place to another") late in 2020 with the aim of stimulating individual entrepreneurship across the world as they firmly believe that entrepreneurism will play a huge role in future economic recovery.

Having spent over 35 years leading and participating in innovation initiatives across a wide variety of organisations and industries, there are sure to be many ways he could help you shape the future of your organisation.