TECHNOLOGY CONSULTANT (contract roles)
Modu.Digital, Accourt & Ubiq Technology
Total years of experience :30 years, 7 Months
I collaborated with consulting businesses (Modu, Accourt, my own) to bring significant changes to various banks (established and emerging) and payment companies.
• I wrote the digital transformation strategies (including target architecture and roadmap of “now” to “target”) for various companies (e.g., Network International, NatWest, Starling, 11Onze, NTT Data).
• Acted as subject-matter expert in domains such as Banking & Payments, and technology expert (cloud native, reactive architecture, microservices & high-performance systems) - mentoring, inspiring and leading-by-example.
• Presented at various functions (200+ people) and workshops (50+ people) to mentor from VP & Engineering Directors down, in all aspects of technology.
Appointed to this scale-up to bring Bnext (an emergent bank) to the top of its segment, both commercially and technologically, and implement BaaS (a Banking SaaS platform).
• Scaled the team 2x and increased its efficiency 200% (by implementing various tech models, including agile delivery, and operating frameworks & standards).
• Introduced technical strategy derived from significant collaboration with product on the product roadmap, that derived future products, in turn deriving the target architecture that led to the overall strategy.
• Introduced new tooling (e.g., CI/DI, automation of monitoring), processes (e.g., the Platform Incident Process) and frameworks (e.g., Microservices Framework, the Event Bus Ecosystem Framework) to support the BaaS implementation, as well as uplift, de-risk and reduce complexity of the existing platform.
• Worked with the executive team to convert commercial objectives and business ambitions into the Technology Roadmap - target roadmap (3 year), actionable yearly roadmap, and finally quarterly deliverables roadmap.
• Built specific delivery frameworks in Jira to provide reliable delivery and transparency to board, product and project management on progress of deliverables - including visibility of roadblocks and their impact on the roadmap.
• Mentored, empowered, and inspired the product & tech teams (and anyone else who wanted to attend!) through frequent workshops showcasing new technology capabilities, showing off the advances by the tech team, and showcasing topics from my experience (e.g., Bitemporal Versioning, Visa/MasterCard issuing, Open Banking) to transfer knowledge to the wider audience.
• Migrated DC to Google Cloud Platform, reducing infra costs by €2m.
• Innovated a new tech-empowered product “Intelligent Banking” utilizing ML and AI - wrote the initial prototypes to mentor the team to own, expand & develop it, and showcased it to Product, who were delighted to support it going forwards.
Appointed to leverage my expertise in SaaS platform building. I modernized the Gamesys platform and moved the culture and philosophy of its technical team into the 21st century to be aligned commercially and deliver compelling product.
• Rebuilt the Gamesys platform with a new business-aligned target architecture, with microservices, reactive architecture (Kafka-based event bus) and microservices and made it 100% cloud-native.
• Introduced standards for all teams (Java / JS / PHP) - mentoring and guiding them on advanced software engineering techniques, automated testing, cloud computing, and distributed & high-performance systems.
• Invented & architected a brand-new gaming engine that was elastically (and infinitely) scalable, fully automated, self-healing and of low complexity to be highly maintainable.
Appointed to provide target SaaS architecture to modernize the Kobalt Platform using modern technologies and standards, and to align it with the business.
• Implemented target architecture and an associated operating model after jousting with business leaders on requirements. Applied my operating models to the target architecture to include delivery, deployment, and tech standards.
• Mentored from engineering directors down to empower them with knowledge and methodology to bring change, introduce & uphold standards, and to become familiar with cloud-native techniques - across the tech division, making tech highly valued, which significantly contributed to acquisition, first by JPJ Group, then by Bally’s.
Appointed to act as global head of architecture to modernize Ingenico’s legacy ePayments division. I solved a very important commercial problem in the process.
• Implemented a unified framework of interoperability (written in C# and Java - I wrote both prototypes) to deal with the untreated commercial problem of how to integrate tech and teams in globally acquired companies. Presented the proposal to board and secured €5m funding to execute on it.
• To support interoperability (the commercial problem I identified and presented solutions to, at board level), I wrote several tech specifications & white papers.
• Designed and implemented the change to the agile operating model through the entire 600-strong tech organization (with 8 directs).
• Spent 6 months visiting the global organization, mentoring in small groups, workshops in moderate groups, and public speaking in large (200+) groups to mentor & empower tech with the interoperability framework, tech standards and techniques such as Kafka (event bus), Microservices, Java & C# expertise, cloud native computing and distributed & performance computing.
• Introduced the Agile Development Framework across Global Ingenico ePayments, mentoring through the embedding process, and bringing in tooling (bespoke Jira orchestration, Confluence, various CI/CD tooling formalizing Java & C# frameworks to include SCA, performance measurement and other integrations).
Technology Fellow Council of Goldman Sachs approved my white paper of 2012, and I was asked to return to Goldman Sachs to own the near-real-time Margining platform implementation - a feature no other Investment Bank has.
• Hand-picked an elite team of developers to deliver this cutting-edge new platform based on my whitepaper of 2012.
• Acted as principal architect and principal developer to deliver the product.
Appointed to deliver a global subledger shared between Operations and Finance, capable of performing 100mm significant transactions a day yet still be resilient.
• Invented a brand-new methodology to deal with resilience at extreme scale (patent in-progress when I left) - no technology solution existed to deal with that scale (1 billion items of data per day).
• Led vendor negotiations with Teradata to make changes to their database implementation - to deal with this kind of scale.
• Co-founded the IaaS/PaaS tech group that leveraged my virtualization and cloud expertise (which later became Morgan Stanley’s premier cloud services).
Appointed out-of-industry (very rare) to lead arguably the most important risk function in Goldman Sachs: Margining (120 technologists worldwide).
• Introduced operating process & procedure to reduce production incidents by 400%.
• Introduced agile methodology and won buy-in from the managing director to roll it out both commercially and technically. Significantly improved delivery due to commercial engagement in the development process.
• Wrote a whitepaper on achieving (then-thought impossible) near-real-time margining & presented it to the Tech Fellow council.
Promoted to Group CTO for the parent company of NetBanx after its successful sale. Owned all of global technology (120 technologists).
• Consolidated the tech team into 3 major languages (from 14) and 2 platforms (from 10), reducing costs by £5m a year.
• Introduced the tech operating model: standards, target architecture and continuous improvement that kept our retention rate at 90%+.
• Introduced a formal Platform Incident Process (PIP) that reduced P1 incidents by 500%.
• Did my part in the heyday of the 2000s - built the UK’s first SMS application gateway, the UK’s first TV-voting platform (in conjunction with BT), and various other digital firsts
Moved from the IBM Consulting Division to join this well-funded exciting startup.
• Invented (and wrote the initial two versions) of the first online payments platform in Europe.
• Won the ISPA industry awards for my innovation two years in a row, beating WorldPay and other better-funded competitors.
• Kept WorldPay behind us with constant innovation - they played “copythe-leader” as their only response to my superior technology platform.
Worked as lead developer for the IBM Consulting Division, such as Unilever (working on their Global Accounting Platform( and other digitalisation projects.
