What happens when the business buys in

Tony Payne and I are only a few minutes into our conversation when he starts laughing. He’s more than two decades into a career he’s reinvented more than once.

“When I grow up, I’ll know what I want to be,” he says. “I’m not there yet.”

So far, that has taken him through software development, cybersecurity, IT and financial auditing, general management, and technology leadership at organizations on two continents.

Payne is senior vice-president of technology and innovation and chief technology officer at British Columbia Investment Management Corporation (BCI), and a 2026 finalist for the 2026 CanadianCIO of the Year Award in the public sector category, presented by the CIO Association of Canada.

At BCI, the technology team doesn’t have to go looking for problems to solve.

Their private equity department wanted to know which companies in BCI’s portfolio might be able to sell to one another. Payne’s team built a portal that mapped what the companies sold and showed where the matches might be.

He says the business usually arrives with the problem and an idea of what it wants. His team can get straight to figuring out how to build it.

“If I look at my career, technology typically tries to find a problem to solve,” says Payne. “What I find here is, it’s great to be in a position where the appetite and the pull is coming from the business that they can’t get enough of technology.”

The business brings the use cases

BCI, an institutional investor, managed $313.7 billion in gross assets as of March 31, 2026. It serves 33 public sector clients, including pension funds, insurance funds, special purpose funds, and an Indigenous settlement trust. 

Its investment decisions affect more than 818,000 pension plan beneficiaries.

Payne prioritizes the people behind those numbers.

“That is why we exist,” says Payne. “That’s why we always say the money we manage isn’t ours. It’s our clients’ money.”

He describes the work as a partnership between the people who know the business problem and the people who know how to build the tool.

Payne puts it in racing terms. Brakes let a race car go faster because the driver can control its speed through the corners. 

Once people know where the limits are, they have more room to move.

Learn the business before you push the boundary

Payne joined BCI in February 2020 after taking the scenic route through technology leadership.

He started his career in software development and cybersecurity before joining a South African hospitality and casino company, where he led IT audit and later oversaw an IT division.

At one of those casinos, Payne spent three hours in a locked cash-counting room as one of three people in suits watching staff follow every procedure exactly. 

With the auditors sitting there, why wouldn’t they? He proposed reviewing randomly selected surveillance tapes instead.

“I’ve always been thinking, how do you do something different?” says Payne. “If there’s a process, there must be a way that you can do it differently.”

After immigrating from South Africa to Canada, he joined the Office of the Auditor General of Alberta. He later returned to technology at ATB Financial, moved into a general manager role at an IT service provider covering Edmonton and Phoenix, and held technology leadership roles across multiple industries before joining BCI.

When Payne arrived at BCI, he started by building relationships across departments. He also created an innovation committee with a lead from each department, which he chairs. The group looks at process and product innovation as well as the culture around it.

“Innovation, in a way, is broader than technology innovation,” says Payne.

One lesson he’s taken from his career is to “stop being a techie,” he says. Talk to the business side in its own language, build credibility by doing what you said you would do, and then push the boundary.

He expects the same of his own team.

“If you’re not paddling, you’re going to flow downstream,” says Payne. “You have to paddle, and you have to have a team around you that can paddle together faster, so you actually go upstream.”

From a leadership perspective, there’s a balance between making progress and having guardrails that gives the team the  “freedom to experiment and accelerate.” 

The demand shows up in how BCI staff use what Payne’s team builds. His group supports AI work across the corporation through a three-tier model. They will do the work for you, do it with you, or train you to do it yourself.

Payne says about 95% of BCI staff use AI every week. On top of that, close to 30% of the company does some form of code development, and most of those people aren’t developers.

At a recent internal hackathon, more than 20 teams competed and three-quarters came from outside the technology group. Payne’s group was outnumbered three to one at its own event.

There are worse problems for a CTO than too many non-techies building things. 

What the business asked for

The projects and the model behind them have already earned BCI two industry awards.

BCI’s I2Pay system uses AI to scan invoices, pull the data, check it against accounting records, and route it through approval. The system cut processing time and duplicate entry, and reduced the number of DocuSign licences BCI needed.

I2Pay was recognized at CIO Awards Canada last year, and BCI’s broader approach to innovation earned it an Innovator of the Year 2025 award from Info-Tech Research Group. 

That’s a respectable trophy haul for an invoice workflow.

Another project automates risk analysis for companies in BCI’s portfolio.

The system ingests financial and competitive information for every company in the portfolio, extracts data from analyst memos, models the risk, and returns a rating. 

Payne says work that once took two weeks now takes a day.

The system could eventually rerun the numbers as new information arrives, he adds, rather than waiting for an annual review.

The team is also looking further ahead with quantum computing. 

BCI worked with the Quantum Algorithms Institute, a B.C. non-profit that helps businesses prepare for quantum technologies, covers post-quantum security and possible uses in portfolio optimization, risk assessment, and financial modelling. 

The security problem starts before quantum computers are ready. Attackers can steal encrypted data now, hold onto it, and decrypt it later once the computing power catches up. The industry calls it “harvest now, decrypt later,” which is about as reassuring as it sounds.

Google has set 2029 as its timeline for migrating to post-quantum cryptography. Payne wants his team ready before the clock runs down.

“I’m not passionate about the technology itself,” he says. “While I’ve been in technology my whole life, what I’m passionate about is the innovation.”

Payne says he used to “get bored” quickly and would often change roles every two to three years. But six years in at BCI, he hopes to stay another 10.

Evidently, not knowing what he wants to be when he grows up is working out.

Final shots

• Technology moves faster when the business arrives with a real problem and stays involved in building the answer.
• Payne built trust by speaking the business’s language, doing what his team promised, and putting guardrails in place before people started experimenting.
• About 95% of BCI staff use AI every week. When most of a company is already using AI, the technology team and the business do better when they build the answers together.

This article is part of a series profiling the finalists for the 2026 CanadianCIO of the Year Awards, public sector category, presented by the CIO Association of Canada. The winner will be announced Oct. 1 in Toronto. Digital Journal is the national media partner for the CIO Association of Canada.