Beyond The Capital from SuperTech

Beyond The Capital from SuperTech looks at professional services technology from outside London, and at the people inside the firms doing the adopting. SuperTech is based in Birmingham. Hilary Smyth-Allen presents. In one episode she gives her roles as chief executive of SuperTech West Midlands and a senior research fellow in the TiPS team at Oxford Brookes Business School. The show has run partnered four-part mini-series, and two of them give a good sense of its range. The first is a collaboration with the Women in Finance Collective, a new network set up to promote and support women working in finance and fintech across the Midlands. That series also went out on the Advisor Tech Show podcast feed. 'Community, Careers and Confidence: The Women In Finance Collective' is introduced as the first of the four, and it asks why the network was set up and who founded it. A guest there observes that more women are moving into business analysis, product management and project management, while fewer are coming in as developers and coders. Personal brand and mentorship get an episode of their own. One guest admits she has not reached out enough, and recalls how lonely senior leadership could feel as the only woman in the room. Her own mentors, she says, have mostly been men, including tech-company CEOs and CFOs who coached her on commercials. The behavioural psychology episode deals with decisions made under pressure. Its advice is short: ask how irreversible a choice really is, lock in the next step you are clear about, and do not wait for confidence, because confidence tends to arrive later. In the next-generation episode, a guest calls herself a bit of a perfectionist who researches tech questions in the evenings so she is ready with an answer. The second series follows TiPS, an accelerator helping mid-tier and smaller accountancy and legal firms experiment with and adopt new technology. Its introduction states the stakes plainly: the options can be bewildering, and a wrong choice can cost money, time and credibility. In the Armstrong Watson conversation with Lucy Hughes and Steve Preston, the point is made that audit quality was already good, but larger and more complex clients made technology alongside the audit worth pursuing. A planned software pilot across three or four clients was changed a few months in. Thorntons, a full-service independent Scottish law firm, is represented by Sarah Blair, Jane McCants and Lewis Quinn, in a conversation recorded at the programme's showcase event at Oxford Brookes Business School. The tone is warm and businesslike. Smyth-Allen asks about success criteria and whether projects went to plan, and at one point remarks that she is trying not to lead the witness. A good first listen is the Collective episode, which explains why the network exists, followed by the Armstrong Watson episode for audit software and a pilot that changed course.