Pieter De Villiers
CEO
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Founder and CEO of Clickatell, Pieter de Villiers is responsible for establishing Clickatell as the world's leading mobile messaging provider, enabling tens of thousands of enterprises and millions of consumers to interact, communicate and benefit greatly via their mobile phone. De Villiers has led the company and its employees through a decade of robust growth and innovation by providing high value, application-to-person (A2P) SMS services to banks and other financial services providers, governments, social communities, and a myriad of mobile developers in several additional vertical markets. |
Early in his successful optometry career, de Villiers made a radical shift by accepting an opportunity to join Micrologix, where he was responsible for identifying innovative e-commerce opportunities in the healthcare sector, a market still in its infancy in 1999. Quickly realizing the potential of the internet and its intersection with mobility, specifically text messaging, De Villiers had the foresight to understand the need for a global web to mobile messaging gateway.
Based on the insight that text messaging would ultimately be used by businesses and organizations to reach consumers, de Villiers co-founded Clickatell in 2000 and began developing what is now considered to be the largest global mobile messaging platform in operation on the web today. Having 10,000+ customers, serving 220+ countries, and connecting through 819 networks, Clickatell provides mobile services for many of the top Fortune 1000.
Member: GSM Association (www.gsm.org), Wireless Internet Caucus (www.ctia.org), Open Mobile Alliance (www.openmobilealliance.org), Wireless Application Service Provider Association (www.waspa.org.za), Mobile Data Association (www.mda-mobiledata.org), Mobile Marketing Association (www. mmaglobal.com)
Past Speaking: CTIA Wireless; Mobile World Congress, Wireless Influencers; and other regional conference throughout the world.
Personal Award Recognition: Mobile Star, Visionary of the Year in Wireless, 2009 & 2010; Visiongain's MCA's Industry Personality of the Year, 2009 (Clickatell industry awards: www.clickatell.com/press/industry_recognition.php)
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Deon van Heerden
EVP Sales and Support
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Deon van Heerden, former Country Manager and Vice President of sales for the Middle East and Africa region, was appointed as EVP of Sales in May, 2009. Early in his career at Clickatell, Deon successfully launched Clickatell's UK sales office and achieved a foothold in the very mature European market in just 18 months. Since then, Deon has been consistently successful in achieving sales objectives in South Africa, the Middle East and Africa, building on the success this team has already achieved with sales to some of South Africa's largest banks and financial services institutions, such as Santam and First National Bank. |
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Van Heerden is an accomplished management consultant and successful entrepreneur with 12 years
experience in a wide variety of large-scale strategic business transformation consulting programs, general
management and operations. Previously, van Heerden held the position of senior manager with Accenture and
The Berkeley Partnership. He also founded a successful private healthcare company in the UK. |
Bill Wolfe
EVP Engineering and Operation
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Bill Wolfe, a senior executive with an excellent track record in managing business cycles, business planning, product innovation, development, marketing and sales, was appointed as Executive Vice President of Global Research & Development Clickatell, in August of 2009.
Heading up Clickatell's Engineering team both in the US and South Africa, Bill's responsibilities include building a world-class research & Development organisation in order to meet Clickatell's customer needs in a rapidly changing environment. |
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Bill assists the EVP of marketing in bringing a strong focus to the financial services sector and developing large infrastructures in order to support millions of mobile transactions.
Bill joined Clickatell from VeriSgn and Openwave Systems were he was responsible for managing critical business cycles to provide complex, intelligent, highly secure and reliable enterprise infrastructures to deliver core communications services targeting the Entertainment, Technology and Telecommunications markets. |
Len Pienaar
EVP Products & Marketing
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Mr. Pienaar joined Clickatell from his CEO position at First National Bank (FNB) to to help all companies around the world understand what is needed to
implement a successful mobile strategy. Now responsible for Clickatell's worldwide Product & Marketing portfolio, Pienaar brings 15+ years of experience
in merging banking, payments and mobility to Clickatell's experienced team.
Creating FNB's Mobile & Transact Solutions, Pienaar played a pivotal role in shaping the mobile banking industry in Africa. Relaunching
Cellphone Banking in '05 with an innovative service allowing people to bank on any phone, he introduced a period of rapid mobile banking growth
not only for FNB, but for the entire banking industry.
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As CEO responsible for ongoing operations, Pienaar ran cellphone banking, pre paid
sales, inContact and mobile wallet services. He was also responsible for the implementation of Cellphone Banking and Pre Paid services for
a number of FNB subsidiaries in Africa, thus increasing his already considerable African experience. During his five year tenure, Pienaar
held direct responsibilities for finance, HR, marketing, risk and compliance, product development and management, quality assurance, and all aspects of IT.
During his tenure at FNB, Len led the strategy behind and deployment of several 'world first' mobile banking services and received local and international
awards - most recently the coveted Celent Model Bank was awarded to FNB. Pienaar also served as a director on the Celpay board, when it was a wholly owned
subsidiary of First Rand, which operates as a mobile payment provider and prepaid distributor in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia.
Prior to FNB, Pienaar held strategic positions at MTN, where he was responsible for the MTN ICE, one of the first mobile entertainment portals; and
Cell C, where he ran Product Development and Management, and was instrumental in the launch of the hybrid contract/prepaid package and low denomination prepaid
vouchers. Pienaar matriculated at Paarl Gymnasium in1987, holds a Mechanical Engineering degree, and received an honours degree in Business Administration
at the University of Stellenbosch. |
Mary Korn
CFO / G&A
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Mary has nearly 25 years of experience in corporate finance, including more than 15 years as either Chief Financial Officer or VP Finance in Silicon Valley, working in both public and private companies.
Her work experience spans across several industries, including Internet software, Software as a Service (SaaS), EDA software, Internet advertising, networking products, services, and consumer products. Mary’s finance expertise includes board communications, business plan preparation, mergers & acquisitions, FAS 123R, valuation, impairment testing, budgeting, forecasting & business models, and systems implementation. |
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In addition, her financial expertise includes negotiating term sheets, raising equity, debt and banking facilities for a variety of companies.
Her technical focus has been working with firms on topics such as revenue recognition and review of stock incentive plans and practices. Her revenue recognition experience includes implementing GAAP compliant practices, preparing product licensing arrangements and SLAs, and advising on sales compensation plans. Mary also has a strong operations orientation, having served as a COO for a SaaS company where she lead the sales, engineering, and operations teams in addition to the traditional finance and G&A functions, such as finance, HR, legal and IT.
More recently, Mary served as Interim CFO for an Internet advertising firm. Prior to that, Mary was in-house CFO for a venture-backed services company with operations in multiple international locations. She was also the CFO for a SaaS firm, a networking company, and an EDA software firm. She has worked with a variety of venture capital and private equity firms, including VantagePoint Venture Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Labrador Ventures, AVI Management Partners, Artiman Ventures, Hummer Winblad, Reed Elsevier, Scale Venture Partners, and MSD Capital.
Mary earned a BA in Finance at Marietta College and an MBA from Santa Clara University. |
Johan Visser
SA Head of Finance
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Johan earned his honours in Accounting at the University of South Africa and became a member
of the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants in 1999. He has more than 10 years
experience in corporate finance, with a strong focus on streamlining financial systems, and
the implementation of cost and cash management controls.
Johan joined Clickatell early in 2008 as Finance Manager, and has overall responsibility for the leadership of the group's finance functions. This will include building on prior exposure gained in large multi-nationals by ensuring Clickatell's finance function delivers relevant, accurate and timely management and operational support. |
Immediately prior to joining Clickatell, he successfully launched GlobalXperience.com, an international travel website, on behalf of a group of UK investors. He has also spent eight years in the UK and USA, working for leading international corporations in the Media and Travel sectors, including Time Warner Inc, Travelocity & Lastminute.com. |
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