From Smart Cities to Fintech, Jannat Maqbool CPA, Hamilton, advances many initiatives
“It’s not every day that you hear about an Australian woman of Punjabi descent with a CPA qualification who has scaled New Zealand’s burgeoning financial technology sector,” writes Adam Courtenay for INTHEBLACK, the monthly business magazine of CPA Australia.
“Jannat Maqbool does not fit into any recognisable category. She might be Australian, but she has worked most of her adult life in New Zealand; she might have been born a Sikh, but she has converted to Islam; and while she might have 20 years’ experience in business technology, she is also a fully-fledged academic.”
For 10 years Maqbool has been a senior academic at Wintec’s Centre for Business and Enterprise in Hamilton. She is a principal adviser at Singapore-based technology research and advisory firm Ecosystm, operations manager at CultivateIT (the Waikato tech sector association), and works with Hamilton City Council on its Smart Cities initiative. She’s also an important cog in the region’s education sector, responsible for shaping the curriculum of students of both accounting and IT.
“Descriptions and titles barely do justice to Maqbool’s wide-ranging – almost maverick – role in the North Island region’s flourishing technology ecosystem,” writes Courtenay. “Just when you think she’s talking fintech, you discover this is only part of the role – she wants to improve agritech, deploy an IoT solution, and consider an application of artificial intelligence too.”
She is also completing a Master’s in digital business at the University of Waikato, for which she was awarded a scholarship. For her thesis she interviewed banks, regulatory authorities, startups and incubators to understand opportunities for collaboration between incumbent corporations and fintech companies in New Zealand.
“I’m passion driven – always wanting to make a difference. Not only am I a woman in tech, but I’m 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.”
Photo by: [uncredited] Source: istart.co.nz
Original article by Adam Courtenay
Adam Courtenay writes business, investment and market-related stories for several major newspapers in Australia including The Sydney Morning Herald/Age and the Australian Financial Review. He recently wrote his first book, Grand Mistresses of the Amazon: The Conquistadors’ First Contact with the Warrior Women of the River.
