Alexandra Buys

As COO of The Delta, I drive operational excellence across the organisation — aligning people, processes, and strategy to enable sustainable growth. I partner with the CEO, CFO, and leadership team to ensure operations, finance, and strategy move in lockstep. I oversee marketing across all pillars, ensuring our brand and campaigns reinforce The Delta’s positioning and growth objectives. On the technology side, I define platform strategy, optimise tools and systems across teams, and lead continuous innovation to give the business a competitive edge. Risk management, compliance, and data privacy are also core to my mandate — from GDPR protocols to business continuity planning — ensuring that our operations remain resilient and secure. I set and monitor KPIs and OKRs, design performance frameworks, and maintain transparency with stakeholders. Beyond internal operations, I engage closely with clients, investors, and partners to represent The Delta and ensure we’re operationally ready for expansion and new market opportunities.

As Partner, I focus on delivering strategic services to corporates and ventures, particularly in the areas of data, operations, and product strategy. I leverage my extensive experience as COO, CPO, and in data engineering to help ventures unlock their operational potential. My support includes enhancing their data infrastructure, business intelligence, operational design, and product strategy and development. From an operational perspective, I specialise in supporting ventures with the design and support of internal processes, ERP solutions and/or the development of custom solutions to optimise business operations. My team provides support with the analysis, design and development custom implementations of data warehousing and business intelligence solutions as well as by leveraging a number of off the shelf solutions across HR, Operations, Finance, Product Development. From a product perspective, I work with new founders and corporates to craft validation strategies and take ideas from idea to validated concept. Following this I will work to craft the strategy for the development of minimum viable products and can thereafter provide either development support or hiring support, to enable the acceleration of the launch of the product to market. This includes both low-code and highly customized MVPs. In my capacity as Chief Information Officer, I provide strategic leadership and management of the company’s information technology (IT) functions. I ensure that IT initiatives align with business goals and objectives, driving innovation and operational efficiency. My role encompasses overseeing business intelligence, data warehousing, automation, reporting, information security, data privacy, IT asset management, SaaS license management, and enterprise resource planning (ERP).

As COO, I was responsible for overseeing the core operations of the business, including the management of our services capability, marketing team, core IT infrastructure, and all business processes. I was responsibile for working closely with the CFO, CTO and Chief People Officer in designing systems, processes and solutions to optimise cross-functional operations. I Ied the design, development, and ongoing management of our custom ERP and data warehousing solutions, which governed all core business processes and interacted with our finance, technology, and services capabilities. I was responsible for designing and optimizing all business processes, particularly those related to service delivery and value proposition design. I championed the adoption of advanced business intelligence tools and practices to generate actionable insights. In collaboration with the marketing team, I defined our value proposition and managed the marketing efforts for all five business units (Campus, Studio, Services, Group, and Capital). I worked closely with the CFO and Chief People Officer to design and develop systems that supported performance management, HR, and financial systems for our multi-national operations across Europe and Africa. In my capacity as CPO, I was responsible for shaping our value proposition, our product strategy services and designing our venture and corporate venture building services capability. I built a team of product managers, designers, and venture architects from 0 to 35+, working closely with our engineering team to support ventures worldwide in developing their MVPs and launching products. In my work as CPO I also regularly consulted on projects, providing strategic support to various ventures and corporates, assisting with go-to-market strategies, product development, and business strategy

Blockchain Entrepreneurs Club South Africa (BECSA) is a community-driven initiative for anyone passionate about blockchain — from distributed ledger technologies and Hyperledger to cryptocurrency and smart contracts. We host regular meetups across South Africa, creating space for entrepreneurs, developers, investors, and curious minds to connect, learn, and share ideas. Whether you’re exploring blockchain’s potential or already building in the space, BECSA offers a platform to network, collaborate, and grow. My focus is on growing and nurturing the community in the Western Cape, making it a hub for blockchain innovation and entrepreneurial energy.

Responsible for the research, specification, implementation and optimisation of a new data warehouse using Amazon Redshift, which performed ETL on data from over 15 different independent data sources. Responsible for company wide management reporting as well as ad-hoc analysis of data, insights and scenarios. Head of a project which required the specification and development of a SQL based financial reporting framework in order to perform complex reconciliations and aggregations of billing data. This enables streamlined partner revenue analysis, financial reporting and revenue reporting. Researched the development of predictive models using R in order to determine the customer quality, customer churn and life time value. Specifically focused on classification models based on logistic regression. Performed ongoing evaluations of potential AWS services that could benefit our data warehouse such as Redshift, EMR and Amazon Machine Learning. Constantly adapting the data warehouse to ensure it operates as efficiently as possible. This includes the aggregation and wrangling of data to enable faster querying and analysis of data. Developer of all company Tableau dashboards, and distributed Tableau workbooks, used for internal analysis of data as well as for client and partner facing reports.

Focused on maintenance and further development of core logic within complex business applications, specifically with Microsoft SQL Server and VB.net applications. This development was related to custom business applications that ranged from financial data warehouses, to applications that provided data analytics for the FMCG industry. A strong understanding of financial databases and investment concepts was required while working with a data warehouse responsible for housing onshore and offshore trade related transactions. Systems for custom file generation were developed, leveraging SQL server procedures as well as SSIS packages, in order to fulfil various South African tax requirements. Understanding of tax calculations of capital gains tax and dividend withholding tax was required to build reports for client reporting purposes. Experience was gained integrating an analytics platform with Tableau Server API. This involved automating workbook and datasource refreshes, as well as downloading tableau packaged workbooks and making these available through a custom user interface.

Focused on maintenance and further development of core logic within a complex business VB.net applications. This required knowledge and experience with Microsoft SQL Server, VB.net web applications and Microsoft Silverlight. Front end development as well as user interface design on web applications, which included the utilisation of HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. Derivation of a custom mathematical algorithm for a South African bank in order to calculate annuities on loans.

Developer in VB.net focused on custom business applications using CSLA framework and HTML5, Javascript and CSS for front-end development. Worked on a project that required the development of an application which integrated with CLEVVA decision making system via APIs. This required a custom user interface and database to interact with this system. Developed the internal knowledge base for the company using Wordpress. Was highly focused on user interface design and front end development utilising CSS3, Javascript (Knockout JS) and HTML5. Was responsible for developing SQL server procedures which calculated the CGT tax applicable on equity trades related to on-shore and off-shore clients. This required research into the calculation of profit using weighted average cost and the development of custom SQL processes which could accurately calculate the profit/loss at a client level. Custom reports were designed and integrated into VB.net applications using crystal reporting.

The Oxford Blockchain Strategy Programme cohesively integrates relevant information on blockchain for business leaders and innovators by showcasing best use cases, value propositions, and implementation strategies in the blockchain industry.

The course equips you with the ability to identify opportunities for disruption in the financial services sector, and enables you to both launch new Fintech ventures and harness new technology to build better financial services firms. The Oxford Fintech Programme is designed for business leaders, managers and financial executives alike. The programme will give you a comprehensive understanding of the multiple aspects of financial technology, including: regtech, proptech and frontiers of financial innovation.