By Business & Finance 
Dómhnal Slattery speaking after picking up the Business Person of the Year award at last year’s Business & Finance Awards
Over the coming weeks, and ahead of the Business & Finance Awards 2017, we are highlighting 50 outstanding tech entrepreneurs shaping the Irish technology landscape.
The Business & Finance Awards, in association with KPMG, has been recognising excellence in Irish business for over 40 years and this awards will take place on Thursday, December 14th at The Convention Centre Dublin.
Mark Roden
Mark Roden founded the multi-award-winning Ding in 2006. The system allows users to send mobile phone top-up to any phone in the world at any time.
Established in 2006 as ezetop, Ding enables people living abroad to send mobile phone top-up instantly to family and friends back home in.
It is currently active in 130 countries with a reach of 4 billion phones on 400 networks, and is headquartered in Dublin with a global headcount of 200.
Roden is a serial entrepreneur, having co-founded Esat Telecom, founded Torc Telecom, and founding ATM operator Easycash. He has also worked at PwC and Nielsen, and studied at Trinity College Dublin, Stanford University and IMD in Lausanne.
Colm Lyon
Colm Lyon founded Fire Financial Services in 2008, and serves as CEO. He previously founded and headed up Realex Payments, which was acquired by Global Payments in a €115m 2015 deal. A well-known industry figure, the UCD graduate has also served as head of central IT at Ulster Bank, director and chairman of the Irish Internet Association, and director and chairman of the Fintech and Payments Association of Ireland.
Fire offers a MasterCard debit card among services for businesses and personal customers in sterling and euro, along with iOS and Android apps. The Realex founder is targeting the UK market having secured office space in Europe’s largest fintech hub in London – Barclays’ new innovation site, Rise London, in Shoreditch, which opened in May 2017.
Mark Little
Little is the founder of social media news agency, Storyful.
He was an award-winning foreign correspondent for the Irish national TV station RTE, presenting the current affairs show, Prime Time, until 2009 and has 20 years’ experience in broadcast journalism.
Little has a proven pedigree in digital media innovation and after building the world’s first social news agency, Storyful, he was in charge of Twitter’s media team in Europe for six months.
He is now exploring new ethical, business and editorial models to sustain and advance quality news.
Liam Casey
Liam Casey is the founder and CEO of PCH, a company that designs custom manufacturing solutions for companies.
Founded in 1996, PCH is headquartered in Cork, Ireland and opened its USA headquarters in 2013 in San Francisco. In the years since its formation, PCH has expanded and now employs 2,800 people worldwide. In recent years, PCH has made a targeted move into product design engineering and development and startup innovation.
Casey is widely recognised as a thought leader on international trade and business in China in the hardware, supply chain management and startup sectors. He spends his time in San Francisco, Cork and Shenzhen. Casey was educated in Blarney, Co. Cork and Cork College of Commerce.
Dómhnal Slattery
Dómhnal Slattery is the founding CEO of Avolon, a global leader in the aircraft leasing industry. His ability to build and rapidly scale a market-leading aircraft leasing platform is evident in his successful establishment of IAMG, RBS Aviation Capital and Avolon through three business cycles – from the early 1990s to today.
In 2010, he founded Avolon, a global aircraft leasing business, which, in five years, has been built into one of the top 10 lessors in the world. Avolon listed on the New York Stock Exchange in December 2014 in what was the largest ever listing on the NYSE by an Irish-founded company.
In August 2015, Avolon announced a merger agreement with Chinese leasing company, Bohai, which valued Avolon at $7.6bn.
In October 2016, Avolon announced an agreement to acquire the aircraft leasing business of CIT Group.
Headquartered in Ireland, with offices in the US, Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai, Avolon’s fleet grew 69% in 2016 to 435 aircraft by year-end and will effectively double again in 2017 on completion of the acquisition of the aircraft leasing business of CIT Group.
Slattery has a Bachelor of Commerce (Hons) from University College Galway and is a graduate of the Accelerated Development Programme from the London Business School.
He also picked up the 2016 Business Person of the Year award at last December’s Business & Finance Awards.
