Head of Engineering – Consumer Finance
DBS Bank Ltd.
Total years of experience :30 years, 3 Months
End-to-end product ownership of in-house developed solutions for Cards platform. Performing Architecture, Solution Design, Framework development, Delivery and QA. Stakeholder management and tech point of contact for the consumer banking platform. Continuously exploring ways to improve straight-through processes across various banking products. Built new cards and unsecured lending products in Indonesia/Taiwan and enhanced existing products in SG and HK. Team size: 20 cross location
Building a new gamified Rewards Loyalty system that spans across Cards, Savings, Wealth, Investment, Insurance, Forex, Merchants, and Wallet. Conducted market research, competitor analysis, customer experiments, technical assessment of internal and vendor systems to build an efective system. Explored models to improve customer stickiness using Gamification/AR, Blockchain/DLT to integrate Merchants for campaign management, settlement, and reconciliation. Managing C-level stakeholders to set the expectations and provide timely program updates.
Built unique functions over the core Credit Card and Unsecured platform for six regions. Solutions incorporated key challenges per country in addition to meeting regulatory and operational requirements. Built an ML based tool to assess name and address match for unsecured lending. Built real-time feeds from Cards processor using Kafka. Implemented QoS for domain APIs.
Built resilient and performant services during a major merger to address functional gaps and data integration for a core revenue generating system. Undertook a major platform transformation exercise to sunset TIBCO suite to port 200 APIs to micro-service architecture.
Led our iWealth (Mobile app for HNI), Relationship Manager app for HNI, Avaloq and Wealth data mart teams. Built a wiki-style knowledge blog named Avaloq University to help new developers to follow best patterns and practices. Built a comprehensive test automation suite for Avaloq.
Mentored new graduates (Graduate trainee programs and Internship) by providing real life development experience. Over 20 graduate developers were mentored, and a vast majority placed as permanent staff.
Set up ofshore delivery team for Cards and Unsecured lending domain. Setup engineering practice and built internal teams to develop critical systems without relying on external vendors. The team is now 100+ strong (started with 2!). Moved to Singapore to lead the engineering practice.
Setup Innovation Garage for clients to embrace Digital transformation, using cognitive science, social media, IoT and Cyber-security. Improved omni-channel experience by using design for happiness using NLP. Created innovative business learning aids for a banking client using augmented reality. Built advisory capabilities to HNI consumers by providing predictive analytics for better investments. Created MVP for a leading high street brand, to explore use of Mobile to drive physical trafic to the brick & mortar store (anti pattern for high value brands, to promote touch/feel shopping for designer products).
Designed, built, and implemented a suite of products for energy measurement, management, report, and control. This is a pre-IoT era product that required me to create hardware, firmware and BPM. Designed board micro-controllers and implemented communication protocol over GSM/PLC networks.
ACA-Net was the precursor to Microsoft enterprise library. Led a team of 35 onsite/ofshore (US, Manila, Spain, India) team to develop ACA-Net framework. Developed leading edge assets for .NET Compact Framework (ACA-Devices), MS-CRM extension, ACA Analytics (A BI framework), SOA Factory, ACA Lifecycle.
ACA-Net SDK provides aspect-oriented interfaces for Data, Exception Handling, Logging, Caching and Security blocks. The tech stack was a precursor to todays Hibernate, micro-services, Factory patterns, Dependency injection and use of DSL.
Led a team to design and develop solutions for logistics and media clients, using Microsoft .NET, DB2, SQL Server, HTML and JavaScript. I mentored the team on .NET, source control and Stored procedure development.
Experience working for various Investment banking, Insurance brokerage, Logistics, and financial management.
• Royal Bank of Scotland
• NatWest Market
• Jardine Lloyd Thompson
• HM Customs & Excise
Pre-internet era development using Perl, C, C++, SQL, Sybase, Solaris, HP-UX, Windows. Developed a be-spoke Mobile POS solution using IVR and GSM technology
