Craig Armstrong

About Me

Craig heads the IT discipline within Shoosmiths’ Technology, Media and Commercial team and advises on a wide range of IT and sourcing matters across a wide range of industry sectors with a particular focus on the IT, financial services and retail sectors.Craig's diverse experience includes negotiating IT system integration agreements, infrastructure and desktop outsourcings, ERP and CRM system procurements, complex IT-centric and business process outsourcings (both onshore and offshore), negotiating software implementation, licensing and support agreements, advising on intellectual property issues within the technology, healthcare and biotechnology sector and advising on contractual arrangements relating to e-commerce trading platforms and co-branded financial services on behalf of financial institutions and retail partners.Craig also has niche expertise within financial services and regularly advises on merchant acquiring, co- branded and affinity products, customer account value added services and other commercial contracts within the retail financial services sector.

Craig is a member of Lexis Nexis’ consulting Editorial Board for TMT, working alongside other leading industry experts in this field. Craig is also the author of Lexis Nexis’ System Integration precedents. Craig is a panel member of LexisPSL’s Q&A service, providing expert advice on topical legal questions raised by LexisPSL’s clients.   

Craig is ITIL certified, the leading global best business practice for IT Service Management.Craig's experience includes advising:

• a UK MNO on its £250m+ IT transformation project to create a SaaS-based new IT system
• the UK's leading video games retailer in respect of a payment systems outsourcing to ensure PCI DSS compliance
• a UK MNO on the potential managed service outsourcing of its entire legacy IT and core network infrastructure to two major outsourced service providers
• the UK arm of a global automotive manufacturer on the parallel retendering of its entire IT infrastructure requirements for two of its automotive brands and which involved a “three horse” bidding process for the five year deal
• a UK challenger bank on the replacement of its existing contractual arrangements with a key IT supplier from a managed service model to a truly outsourced model whilst also tripling the breadth of IT services provided by the supplier to the bank