“Innovation is only meaningful when it creates value for people,” Winifred Kula told Exepreneur.
Kula works at BSP Financial Group, as Head of Digital Channels, and she gave Exepreneur an extended interview on a career that has run through two of Papua New Guinea’s largest financial institutions and, more recently, into peer-reviewed software engineering research.
The view has held for most of a career that began with a programming job. After graduating from the Papua New Guinea University of Technology, she joined Nambawan Super as a programmer analyst in 2000, at a point when PNG’s largest superannuation fund was still running on systems that predated the internet most of its members now use to check a balance.
Twenty-five years later she sits inside the largest bank in the Pacific. BSP Financial Group serves more than 3.6 million customers through over 121 branches, more than 300 ATMs and 12,000 EFTPoS terminals, according to the Commonwealth Enterprise and Investment Council, and it is listed on both PNGX and the Australian Securities Exchange under the code BFL.
“I didn’t set out to build a career in technology,” she told Exepreneur. “I simply wanted to make a difference.”
What twenty-five years actually taught her
Her distinguished career spans government, financial services, technology, and the private sector.
“Looking back, I realize the most valuable lessons I have learned were never really about technology,” she reflects.
“They were about people, leadership, and creating value.
Today, she serves as an executive at BSP. Following the April 2023 rollout of its new core banking platform, BSP navigated a period of post-implementation challenges before stabilizing the system, as noted by Group Chief Executive Mark Robinson in Business Advantage PNG. Robinson shared that this new infrastructure now allows the bank to pivot toward modernizing its service delivery, a digital evolution that directly reshapes the customer experience.
“My role is not simply about digital channels,” she told Exepreneur. “It is about helping create better outcomes for customers, strengthening governance and ensuring digital investments deliver lasting value for the business and the communities we serve.”
From systems to capability
The shift she describes happened gradually, and she dates its origin to the enthusiasm of a new graduate.
“Like many graduates, I was fascinated by solving problems and excited by what innovation could make possible,” she says. “But as my career evolved, so did my understanding of what creates lasting change.”
What replaced it was a definition of organisational success that has nothing to do with software.
“I came to realise that successful organisations are not defined by the systems they implement,” she told Exepreneur. “They are defined by the value they create for customers, the capability they build within their teams and the trust they earn from the communities they serve.”
The practical consequence, as she describes it, was a reordering of her own priorities. “My focus shifted from building systems to building capability, from delivering projects to strengthening governance, and from implementing change to enabling better business outcomes.”
“Transformation is not something we do to people. It is something we build with them” she concludes.
The conservationist and the quiet one
Her late father, Gaikovina Raula Kula, spent his career in conservation. In her account he “dedicated his life to conservation and to building partnerships that protected Papua New Guinea’s natural heritage,” and watching him work across communities, government and international organisations taught her “that lasting change begins with service and grows through collaboration.” It is a specific inheritance for someone now running digital delivery inside a bank operating in seven Pacific countries, where the hard problem is rarely the code and almost always the coordination.
The other half came from her mother, and Kula gives that account at more length.
“Through her quiet strength, resilience and unwavering support, she showed me that leadership is often expressed through humility, consistency and perseverance,” she told Exepreneur. “Grounded in strong Christian values, she demonstrated that serving others with integrity and compassion leaves a far greater legacy than titles or recognition.”
She carries the standard forward in explicit terms. “Those lessons continue to shape how I lead, build partnerships and invest in people.”
Mentors in Papua New Guinea, Australia and internationally filled in the rest, and she credits them with pushing her to think differently and keep learning.
“Leadership is never achieved alone.”
The argument against blueprints
“One of the greatest lessons my career has taught me is that there is no universal blueprint for transformation,” she told Exepreneur.
She allows that imported solutions can work. Her argument is about direction of travel: Papua New Guinea and the Pacific hold perspectives and problem-solving methods that belong in the global conversation, rather than only receiving from it.
“The future is not built by importing ideas. It is built by connecting them.”
That position is grounded in geography and delivery rather than sentiment. Distance, cultures and community structures shape how Pacific customers experience a service and how an institution can deliver one, and for BSP that is a live operating constraint rather than a talking point.
Robinson has described the bank’s rural footprint to Business Advantage PNG as improving access for people who face difficulty reaching urban centres, achieved through a combination of technology, community outreach and collaboration.
BSP maintains the largest branch network in Papua New Guinea, the Cook Islands, Fiji, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga and Vanuatu, with sub-branches and agents in rural locations, and employs more than 4,300 people across the region.
“Global experience is valuable,” she says. “Local understanding is essential.” The synthesis, in her formulation, is that “the strongest solutions emerge when global knowledge meets local leadership,” with ideas adapted to context and local experience contributed back outward.
Still a student
Curiosity is the trait she keeps returning to, and she has kept putting herself back in rooms where she is the one learning.
“One of the greatest lessons I have learned is that leadership begins with curiosity,” she says. “Learning does not stop when we become leaders. If anything, it becomes even more important.”
The Australia and PNG Emerging Leaders Program came first, and she is also an alumnus of the United States International Visitor Leadership Program, where she says she learned from leaders in governance, investment and public policy while putting a Papua New Guinean perspective into the room.
More recently she has worked alongside her brother through BRIDGES. The initiative, she told Exepreneur, brings “together researchers, students, industry and communities to solve real-world challenges through responsible AI, open-source collaboration and shared learning,” and the experience reinforced a conviction that “knowledge should flow in every direction.”
Her brother is Professor Raula Gaikovina Kula of The University of Osaka, a software engineering researcher whose published work covers open-source dependency chains, library security lags and code proficiency. He carries their father’s names in reverse order.
BRIDGES itself stands for BRIdging Divides with Globally Engineered Software, and its organisers describe the objective as a forum where researchers and practitioners can work on bridging the digital divide within what they call a geographic-free global software engineering setting, with the stated goal of making software engineering universal, available to anyone, anywhere, without technical, cultural or educational boundaries.
Kula appears in that work as a researcher rather than a subject, credited as co-author on “Building BRIDGES across Papua New Guinea’s Digital Divide in Growing the ICT Industry,” a peer-reviewed paper presented at the IEEE and ACM Symposium on Software Engineering in the Global South at ICSE 2025 in May 2025, written with her brother and with researchers from the University of Melbourne, the Papua New Guinea University of Technology, Shinshu University, Singapore Management University and Tianjin University. Her affiliation on that paper is eNovaX Solutions, Port Moresby, alongside her BSP role.
The BRIDGES organisers also ran a Summer School in the South Pacific from 9 to 11 January 2026, titled Innovative Prototyping through AI and Open Source, listing Kula among its faculty alongside Professor Youmei Fan of the Nara Institute of Science and Technology and Dr Benson Mirou of the Papua New Guinea University of Technology. The published faculty listing carries a note beside her name stating that her contribution sits outside her role and interests at BSP.
That is the same argument she makes about blueprints, applied to research instead of banking. Papua New Guinea and the Pacific, in her words, “are not simply recipients of global ideas” but contributors to them. The peer-reviewed citation is the evidence for the claim.
What she thinks the region should be building
Her forecast for the region avoids the technology adoption framing that dominates most digital economy commentary in the Pacific.
“As our region continues its digital journey, our greatest opportunity is not simply to adopt new technologies,” she told Exepreneur. “It is to strengthen our institutions, prepare future leaders and create opportunities for more people to participate in the digital economy.”
Participation is the measurable part of that, and it is the part PNG’s financial sector has struggled with. Bank of PNG’s financial inclusion targets depend on reaching Papua New Guineans with limited connectivity, and the country’s banks have been building digital tools against that constraint rather than around it. Nambawan Super, where her career started, now manages close to K10 billion in funds under management for more than 200,000 members and runs an online member portal, a mobile app and an SMS balance service. The distance between the fund she joined in 2000 and the fund that exists now is the distance her career has covered.
Her description of the leaders she expects to matter next is the closest thing the interview produces to a job specification.
“I believe the future will belong to leaders who can connect global ideas with local understanding,” she says. “Leaders who listen before they lead, who build partnerships before they build solutions and who measure success not only by what they deliver, but by the value they create for people.”
Asked to summarise, she returns to where she started. “Looking back, I realise I never set out to build a career in technology. I simply wanted to make a difference. That purpose continues to guide me today.”
Her definition of the job itself is deliberately unglamorous.
“Because leadership is not about having all the answers. It is about listening. Learning. Building trust. Creating opportunities. And investing in people.”
