It is with deep sadness that I write that our colleague and friend Richard Stanton has passed away. He was 64.

Most people in our industry knew him as the Stanno, the Curo guy. He was. But he was also the colleague who would drop everything to help you, the one who loved teaching and mentoring others, and the one most likely to make you laugh on a Friday afternoon.

This is my attempt to capture some of what made him Richard.

He loved Curo

Not in a closed-off, techie way. In a way that made you want to understand it too. He could explain things to a client or colleague without anyone feeling stupid.

And he built things. Not just for his own self satisfaction – although I have no doubt he derived pleasure from it too – always with the primary intention of helping someone else. He plotted upcoming client reviews onto an interactive map inside Teams, so that advisers and their admin teams could book face to face meetings by location. His reasoning: “Having two meetings one hour and 300 miles apart can be a bit stressful!” Practical, useful and a bit of fun. That was Rich.

Some words from Richard Brian, Managing Director of Curo

“I had the privilege of knowing and working with Rich for close to 30 years, first at Quay Software in the late 90s and then at Time4Advice from 2011. Rich was always so positive and passionate about our industry and the technology we worked with, and nowhere more so than with Curo, which he championed with our clients for well over a decade. Even after he joined Evotra in 2024, we carried on working together with our joint clients, and I valued that enormously.

He made all of our lives better. He was a great mentor and role model for our team and for the clients we worked with, always generous with his time and knowledge, and always ready with a bit of humour when it was most needed.

Rich was a true gentleman, and it will take us some time to come to terms with our loss.”

He was always so willing to help

This is one of the things I loved most about him.

Rich ran a weekly Curo training series for our team. Security roles, data structures, advanced finds, views, charts, dashboards. He recorded every session, numbered them so anyone joining later could follow them in order, and shared them with everyone.

When someone new joined, he was so often the first in the thread offering to introduce them to Curo. He set colleagues up with their own developer environments so they could practise without worrying about breaking anything whilst at the same time apologising for “teaching my grandmother to suck eggs”. And always offering to stop what he was doing to help others.

As co-founder, it’s my prerogative to be online late in the evenings, but he’d so often see the green blob on my Slack status and drop me a note offering to jump on a huddle to help with anything.

He was endlessly curious about what was coming next, too. He was one of the most active voices on our #AIplayground Slack channel, testing new tools, giving careful, constructive feedback on what worked and what didn’t, and sharing what he was reading with a healthy dose of scepticism.

The roadtrip

This summer, Rich and I visited a financial advice firm’s six offices together. Six site visits, from Dorset to Cumbria. Car parks, trains, hotels and a lot of motorway.

Mid roadtrip, we enjoyed a rather romantic Thai dinner for two in Kendal, which I’ll always remember fondly. I’ve learned from his other half in the last few days that, in fact, Rich had just eaten Thai the night before, but was too polite to say anything when I suggested Thai again the following night. The next day we enjoyed a Cornish pasty under the world’s smallest umbrella when the heavens opened at Oxenholme station. I keep thinking how glad he must have been of the gastronomic change of scene, even if he did get drenched in the process.

He was brilliant in the room. People opened up to him because he listened, and because he knew Curo inside out. I loved hosting those workshops with him. We both related to the people in the room so well, I think perhaps because we were both financial advisers before we moved into the world of technology. It was a real joy to do that alongside someone who had made the same journey.

We had a running joke about who got to play bad cop. He never got the role. Apparently he looked too much like a cuddly bear to pull it off.

I remember one evening, he finished a full day on site, got home late after horrendous traffic, and was still back at it the next morning writing up his notes. The framework he built from those visits is still shaping the work we’re doing there now.

Ever curious

Richard was remarkably clever. Not in a showy way. He was just full of fascinating facts. He was very well read, and he loved Mastermind, University Challenge and a good quiz. I learned this week that his first date with his partner Amanda was at the Natural History Museum. Of course it was.

Whatever interested him, he went all in. Coffee most of all. He once told me that after 30 years in technology, his favourite gadget was a mug that kept his coffee at the perfect temperature. Back to back meetings all day, and it would still be just right.

He’d recently been planning a coffee tasting session at Evotra HQ with another member of the team, in which he was going to bring the coffee and she was going to bring the caramacs (a personal joke between them). We’re so sad it never got to happen.

And funny

Richard’s humour was dry, a bit old school and occasionally not entirely politically correct. Always well meant though.

One colleague told us she voted for him at our employee awards because he always looked on the bright side and brought fun to boring meetings (I can’t imagine whose meetings she was referring to). In her words, his jokes were “always on the right side of cheesy”, and they always made her laugh out loud.

When a colleague announced on Slack that she’d got locked out of her postbox, Richard was first in with a fix. He owned a lock pick set. Why? “Because I was fed up with Premier Inn stopping me from opening windows in hot weather.”

Then, on a new line: “Your Honour.”

That same afternoon he told us about the time, years ago in the East End, a factory burglar alarm had been ringing for hours. So he shimmied up the wall and started stuffing some “personal” items into the bell to shut it up. He heard a discreet “Ahem” and looked down to find two Met officers watching him with interest. They saw the funny side. But they did make him take the undies back out.

During the eclipse, when we were all comparing colanders: “Using a colander so you don’t strain your eyes? I’ll get me coat.”

On a particularly alarming article about AI: “Potentially the scariest thing I’ve read since my credit card statement.”

And his favourite musical was Les Mis, which he summed up as poor people starving, getting sent to prison, getting exploited and all getting shot. Perhaps, he admitted, that said something about him.

And then there’s his profile picture. Rich, dressed as Zorro, astride a motorbike, grinning from ear to ear. That’s how a lot of us will remember him.

Thank you, Stanno. We’ll miss you.

Much loved partner, father, grandfather, colleague and friend.

His work is still shaping what we do for clients, and will continue to do so for some time. He’s leaving a big hole.

Written by: 

Sally Merritt, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer