Derek Keats

Background

About Derek Keats

Derek was in higher education for more than 25 years, where he had a successful research and teaching career before moving into management positions. He spent 12 years in level-two (vice president equivalent) positions at two different universities, and in both was in an IT Leadership-type role. He served on the Council of the two universities, and also on the board of the Cape IT Initiative and International Ocean Institute. In 2011, he left higher education to pursue interests in the private sector. For a while he ran his own consulting business, Kenga Solutions, but then became Chief Scientist at a startup called thumbzup, his first payment-technology innovation company. It was there that the startup bug kindled at the Cape IT Initiative and its Bandwidth Barn bit hard. In 2018 he took on the responsibility for Global Business Development at thumbzup, but left the company in mid 2019 to rebuild Kenga Solutions and take on some new projects. Previous consultancy clients have included Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Armscor, GITOC, Sangari, thumbzup, Gattaca and Consilium Global. At the beginning of 2020, he joined onoConnect as head of compliance and business development under contract. Finally the startup bug matured, and Derek joined a group of payment specialists to establish the ExiPay Group of companies (https://exipay.com) along with Finimo Solutions (https://finimo.com). He lives on a wildlife estate in Hoedspuit and works globally largely from home. In his spare time, he has a passion for nature, nature photography (especially birds) and making weird noises on his guitars.