Intelligence matters

‘All of his know how was sitting in our server. This institutional intelligence was a company asset and I had to find a way to preserve it before Tim retires. So I came up with the idea of “cognitive archiving” using AI that would learn from his digital history. We first looked at using the AI tool to automate all the repetitive manual tasks that slow down the sourcing of materials.’

Tenacious innovator

This was just the start of Lourdes’s AI journey. In 2019, Lourdes received a €5,000 innovation voucher from his local enterprise office, then partnered with Technological University Dublin. This led to receipt of €500,000 from the Irish government and, in late 2024, his tech startup Spear won gold at the National Startup Awards, with a funding round planned for 2025.

Lourdes is nothing if not tenacious. This is someone who presented his parents, including an ACCA accountant father, with a budgeted business case to let him leave Malaysia to study in Dublin in the mid-1990s, and then win a position with Deloitte Ireland amid a recession when Irish graduates were flocking overseas for work.

But his tenacity is perhaps best exemplified by his experience during the global financial crisis. After over a decade with Deloitte, BDO and KPMG, in 2007 Lourdes made a move, which, with the benefit of hindsight, might best be described as not optimum timing.

‘I went into business with an Irish developer looking to move into Europe. We bought some real estate in the Benelux region, then the global financial crisis hit the following year,’ he recalls. ‘The group collapsed, I got dragged into receivership, with further risks of liquidation and litigation; it was a massive car crash.’

Nevertheless, he managed to decouple his subsidiary, which held prime land for a project at a major capital city in Europe, and convinced his crisis-hit bank to lend him more money; ‘If you sink me, you lose everything and the last thing you need right now is a high-profile loan going bad,’ was his pitch.

With no building experience and not speaking the local language, he completed the project, sold it to a foreign investor, paid off his lender and made a tidy profit. But the crisis wasn’t yet done with him.

Unfamiliar terrain

A chance meeting at Luxembourg airport led to Lourdes becoming a special adviser at Central Bank of Ireland at a time when ‘things were collapsing around us’. In his three years as a regulator, he was involved in developing strategies involving Anglo Irish Bank’s  exposure to Quinn Group and attending board meetings at Allied Irish Bank as an observer for the regulator.

Nevertheless, the state took ownership of AIB. This was not familiar terrain for Lourdes, whose background was corporate finance, commerce and problem-solving. ‘I had ideas and strategies, but I couldn’t share them with the management of AIB as it was beyond my scope as an adviser. Meanwhile, the Central Bank Act, the separation of power between the regulator and the state and other reasons prevented me from sharing what I saw in AIB with the ministry of finance. They became the ultimate owner and I felt they needed to know there was a car crash about to happen and they might want to put on a seat belt,’ he recalls.

It was an eventful three years that he ‘thoroughly enjoyed’, and it led to further advisory work in dealing with distressed real estate transactions in the private sector. Lourdes also volunteered his expertise in the form of non-executive directorship (NED) roles to charities such as Irish Rule of Law International from 2015 to 2022, and currently sits on the board of Prisoners Aid Through Community Effort and community loan finance provider Clann Credo.

‘NGOs seek my expertise on finance matters and to assist the board in instructing auditors, as well as supervising the implementation of recommendations made by auditors in improving internal controls,’ he says. ‘I feel NGOs play a critical role where the government has a duty to society but lacks the structure to be more agile in delivering essential services. As a NED, together with a board we offer support to the management team in delivering these services.’

Cutting-edge idea

Entrepreneurship beckoned once again in 2016. In gaskets and seals he found an unsung hero in Kemtron, a traditional small company selling old but indispensable technology that would lead to a cutting-edge idea.

‘Everyone in the world is within one or two metres of a gasket; in fact, you have a couple next to your ears,’ he says. ‘In your headphones are a pair of gaskets that are absorbing sound so you don’t damage your eardrums,’ adding that Kemtron used to make them for speakers business Bose when it had a manufacturing unit in Ireland. The company now makes gaskets for Pfizer, Eli Lily, Danone and other processing plants.

The spark that ignited his idea for Spear was lit by the realisation that, while Kemtron’s supply chain was unique and carefully curated, its procurement was antiquated. ‘Skilled employees were spending too much time communicating with suppliers or searching through old emails to find parts and prices, looking for lead times, when technology should be doing all of that,’ says Lourdes.

Spear was tested in Kemtron, but today Lourdes is working with aviation companies including airline maintenance crews to help address supply-chain issues for parts.

‘Sourcing spare parts is a huge challenge for the aviation industry and one of the biggest costs for an airline is grounded aircraft,’ he says. ‘Let’s say a plane lands and a brake pad is gone, or a life jacket is torn; it’s not allowed to take off. This often leads to a huge amount of expensive last-minute sourcing, all done manually over email.’

Spear automates the search, ordering, and track and trace process, and it’s always learning and using cognitive archiving, so will increasingly foresee blockages or lengthening lead times and ultimately help with scenario planning and risk management in a supply chain. It doesn’t end there, however; Spear is now extending into sustainability reporting and settling legal disputes between sellers and buyers.

And, with Lourdes’s tenacity and energy, it looks like the sky’s the limit when it comes to innovation.