Dr Eugene Wessels turned a school floppy disc into a prosperous career. Today, as group chief technology officer of King Price Insurance, he is navigating the most disruptive technological moment of his career, while still making Sunday-night toasted sandwiches for his family.
Before King Price group chief technology officer Dr Eugene Wessels understood data warehouses or insurance premiums, he was a technology enthusiast. “I really took a liking to computer classes at school, so much so that I wrote a maths program for a computer competition event,” he recalls.
As a school boy, Eugene and his friends were desperately seeking a solution to a school-based math project that would take long hours, if not days or weeks to complete. “We were lazy and we only wanted to do sports. So, I wrote a computer program that would spit out the answers – and display the work,” he says.
The workaround proved quite popular among the students and it wasn’t long before his floppy disc became a hot commodity and everyone wanted a copy. “At first, I got into trouble at school for it. But, we ended up submitting that program to a local school computer science competition and I won a prize. I was even featured in the local newspaper.”
The competition sparked a lifelong love for computers. Despite having a talent for coding and a natural ability to master computers, Eugene’s dad wasn’t convinced it was the path for his son.
“In 1999 when I matriculated, I wanted to study computers. But my dad was convinced that the big dot-com bubble was going to burst and encouraged me to study architecture. So I enrolled for both architecture and computer science,” he says.
In time, Eugene could not convince himself to follow both and at the last minute appealed to his dad to study his one true love, computer science. His father had warned him that computer science is a constantly developing field and would require him to become a lifelong learner. Eugene was up for the task and committed the next few years to his studies, completing a bachelors and masters in computer science.
While working in the industry, he next embarked on a PhD in information systems and earned his doctorate in 2015.
From Sars to King Price
Eugene cut his teeth at the South African Revenue Service (Sars), an assignment that would shape the next decade of his professional life.
The organisation was undergoing what he describes as one of the largest IT projects in South African history, which was to bring the tax collector online. He became immersed in the challenge of taking vast institutional data assets, building warehouses to hold them, layering intelligence on top and using the resulting picture to identify where processes were broken and fraud was hiding.
“Back then they called it data mining,” he says. “If you fast-forward that journey to today, you’d call it AI. The work was, in essence, a precursor to everything that the industry now speaks of in terms of machine learning and predictive analytics applied not to an abstract dataset, but to the tax affairs of an entire nation.”
After a decade, Eugene was ready to leave the public sector and venture into a space he was eager to occupy – financial services. A contact introduced him to King Price.
When he entered the fray, the insurer was still young, but fast-growing and straining at its seams. “It was typical startup growth pains. The business was accelerating exponentially but the systems weren’t maturing at the same pace.”
He was brought in precisely for the combination of skills he had built: technical fluency, an understanding of how businesses are fixed by aligning technology with process and the ability to implement a data and measurement layer on top, so that one can see where things are broken.
What followed was a 10-year process which Eugene describes as a “rinse and repeat”. The short-term personal lines business was stabilised and made profitable. A commercial line acquisition followed, then a life insurance business, a Namibian operation and an expansion into Denmark. Each time: take the systems, fix them, align with the process, instrument everything and squeeze performance through continuous iteration.
“The best times I’ve had at work are when all hell breaks loose and nobody’s going to sleep for a month. The relationships you build with your team in those moments – nothing compares.”
During this decade, Eugene’s title evolved from data and BI leadership to CTO.
When asked about his leadership journey, he speaks about talent retention with the warmth of someone who has observed people grow under his watch. He considers this among the most meaningful milestones his career has produced.
As a leader, his instinct, honed by years of experience with challenges such as individual agendas and misaligned incentives, is to take the long view on people. “Be patient with their development and resist the short-term reaction. Eventually, the end state is much more positive than if you’d had a knee-jerk response.”
The Pokémon collector, the cook and the dad
During his chat with CIO South Africa, a wall-to-wall Dragon Ball-Z poster stands out in the background. When asked about it, he proudly reveals that King Price offices have a chilled atmosphere where everyone can feel at home. He also says he is the custodian of a valuable collection of original Pokémon trading cards.
“Vintage cards from around 1995, graded professionally, some of them genuinely rare. There’s a massive following,” he says. “Once you get to understand it, it really is insane.”
Although his wife does not quite share his enthusiasm, Eugene is thrilled to be a part of the Pokémon collector’s community.
At home in the evenings, after a gym session that he values as much for the camaraderie as the exercise, Eugene occasionally enjoys being behind the stove – a firm favourite being traditional lasagna made with a creamy white sauce, generous helpings of cheese and lots of spice.
On weekends, his teenage daughter often requests that he prepare crème brûlée as dessert. And every Sunday evening, without fail, his family’s tradition includes toasted sandwiches such as chicken mayo or Sloppy Joes made by dad. Non-negotiable.
His daughter, who turned 13 recently, is his Nintendo co-conspirator. The father-daughter duo can sometimes spend hours playing Super Mario together. “She’s such a cool girl,” he says beaming.
He says while everyone warned him of adolescent moods, Eugene says his daughter was blessed with a sweet temperament. Although, his wife observes that Eugene himself might be of statistically higher-risk for adolescent moods in such an equation – a conclusion he accepts as “probably true”.
