Meet the Board

Steve Holden
Chief Executive Officer, ITSO Ltd

In his role of CEO, Steve’s role focuses on managing the corporate direction and strategy of the organisation whilst continuing to increase it’s resilience by strengthening the team, improving technology and supporting processes.  Prior to his appointment as CEO in November 2020, Steve was General Manager for ITSO, where he steered the company’s focus towards developing an updated version of the ITSO Specification ensuring that ITSO stays relevant and in line with connected-cities technologies. 

Prior to joining ITSO, Steve spent five years as Technical Consulting manager within the Retail Global Business Unit at Oracle, helping clients design and implement enterprise retail solutions and integrate payment services. Steve has extensive experience working within the payment sector and has more than 18 years’ experience as a senior technical manager, during which time he spent several years as an active developer and architect on a number of high profile projects.

Gordon Hanning
Non-Executive Director

Gordon has worked in the public sector side of passenger transport for 38 years, holding senior positions in both local authority and in central government. During that time he has built up extensive close relationships with many senior people across all the public transport modes, and with most elements of the smart ticketing and payment supply chain, spanning policy, strategy and delivery. He has delivered, and continues to manage, one of the largest ITSO schemes in the UK. His strengths include a high level of commercial acumen, alongside the core public sector skill set around audit, risk and governance, and – most of all – a consistent track record of delivery achieved on time and on budget.

Alistair Smith
Non-Executive Director & Chairman of Yotra Ltd

Alistair is a commercially driven Non-Executive Director and Board Advisor. He has worked across multiple sectors, both public and private including financial, consumer goods, utility and transport. He has an in depth knowledge of the UK transportation sector having served as Director of Commercial and IT for Stagecoach Group during which time he created and led a new Digital Division to deliver a £100m transformation programme.

During this time he also delivered and managed some of the largest commercial ITSO schemes in both rail and bus throughout the UK.

Christian McMahon
Non-Executive Director

Christian is a commercially astute CIO/CTO, Board Advisor, Business Leader, Non-Executive Director, Change Agent and Start-Up Mentor ranked as the 11th most influential CIO in the world. He has a strong track record of success in a permanent and interim capacity at board level across multiple sectors with substantial experience in VC (pre-IPO) and PE backed companies.

Christian is highly skilled in building collaborative working relationships with key stakeholders and in leading companies through transformation, turnaround, tech-enabled innovation, M&A, product overhaul and IPO.

Catherine Waller
Non-Executive Director

Catherine is a multi-sector, omni-channel Marketing professional, Board Advisor and Non-Executive Director. She spent her early career at Tesco where she led development of the world’s largest loyalty scheme; and is now an expert to UK and International organisations on Big Data, Customer Insight, CX, CRM and Customer Journeys.

Catherine has overseen the strategic development of some of the UK’s largest brands, delivering growth and consumer advocacy across established and start-up ventures. She has a track record of sound financial control, governance, risk management and regulatory compliance across multi-million pound programmes.