CxO Advisory - Financial Services
Kearney
Total years of experience :27 years, 0 Months
Senior strategic lead for 2 major cloud-based digital IT projects as part of the Saudi Vision 2030:
o Saudi EXIM - IT strategy lead for the new bank - define full IT strategy and govern delivery; define vendor requirements for RFP process; evaluate/select/onboard vendor; define governance framework and ensure compliance; escalate and resolve all issues
o Saudi Social Development Bank (SDB) - development and presentation of the full IT strategy for digital transformation with a focus on cost efficiencies, process automation and future-proofing the IT landscape
Leadership and development of IT strategy ensuring best in class for end-to-end cloud-based digital architecture.
Head IT transformation and integration across practises, organisation and technology to ensure a seamless transition from a legacy bank to a cloud based digital bank with a focus on customer service and experience.
Engage with C -level executives to define strategies, business drivers and business/customer benefits.
Implement strategy to mitigate future IT risk, ensure IT is ‘future proof’, secure and compliant with all regulations.
Create a roadmap to address gaps identified from a people, process and technology perspective.
Sole management of IT budget for Capex and Opex.
Vendor management and governance of external partners.
Management of the IT governance programme.
Formulated strategy and digital architecture for a new and innovative start-up in the Digital Media eCommerce and online delivery sector - accountable for architecture and roadmap from launch to final solution. Open source based cloud native architecture hosted on a public cloud with global reach running on OpenShift/Kubernetes/Docker. Apps built on containerised Microservice architecture whilst adopting Agile, DevOps and CI/CD pipeline. Investigated Blockchain technology to create a digital media contract/proof-of-ownership chain.
and presented the full IT Strategy and Digital Transformation plan for the Saudi Credit Bureau.
•Interviewed business, IT and CxO stakeholders to capture ‘as-is’ and ‘to-be’ digital landscape and ensured alignment of plan with priorities, business drivers and industry best practice.
•Performed gap analysis and developed roadmap for circa 29 strategic activities to move SIMAH IT to its target maturity level.
CIO on improvements to the IT organisation, operational and technical landscape encompassing people, process, technology, and proposed changes to support business growth.
•Defined, planned, budgeted and led replacement of major parts of the legacy custom built integration layer with a new SOA Platform and new SOA Services built on IBM stack.
•Responsible for RFP process, budgeting, vendor management, methodology, technical direction and defining the Integration CoE roles and organizational structure.
•Banking technical environment: Misys Equation, ACI Postillion, MS Dynamics, SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, Java J2EE & .NET channels/apps/gateways, Windows, IBM i, HP & IBM Servers, EMC Storage. Active / DR sites with replication.
leadership role within a start-up environment setting the strategic direction of a high quality, controlled, consistent and cost-effective delivery of eServices to Saudi citizens and internal stakeholders.
•Head of a department forming, managing and executing the multi-year Digital and Traditional IT Strategy.
•Developed strategy for IT migration and transformation focused on building and managing a hybrid cloud and migrating and adding new applications over time.
•Built capability to provide services in the areas of IT Strategy, IT Governance, Enterprise Architecture.
•Accountable for budgeting and forecasting.
•Built competence in technologies such as SOA Integration & Microservices, ERP, CRM and Contact Centre, Cloud Computing, Consolidated and Virtualised Datacentre technology and Information Management (BI, DWH).
•Significant input in the creation of Tamkeen operational model together with its associated organisation chart.
Enterprise Architecture office and Architecture management.
•Developed architecture governance processes, architecture principles and technical standards.
•Baselined the current enterprise architecture and created the target architecture using input from the Business and IT Strategy developed in the previous months.
•Made recommendations to the senior management in the form of a multi-year roadmap highlighting changes to the overall IT landscape to reach the target architecture
•Assessed the capabilities of senior staff so as to enable structure development plans on behalf of the CIO.
Invited back to Saudi Payments to apply quality assurance to the detailed design of the technology replacement of the current national payment system (SADAD2).
Sole accountability for the re-engineering and expansion of the national payment system in 3 phases: Technology replacement of the as-is system (SADAD2) and roadmap for the expansion of the biller base from 100’s to 1000’s, and addition of online payment capability (OLP). SADAD2 core architecture built on IBM Stack (DataPower, WSRR, WMQ, IIB), high speed transaction processing engine exposing SOA services and built on IBM Integration Bus and Finance handled by Oracle ERP.
Met BEP and BAM requirements for real-time and short-term SLA measurement using WBM/WBE. Reporting infrastructure design based on an Oracle ODS and OBIEE. Enterprise Management using Tivoli. High Availability architecture stretched across multiple sites for disaster recovery using Oracle GoldenGate and EMC SAN Replication for transaction and non-transaction based replication.
Reported to the IT AGM (CIO) as Lead for the Design Authority developing blueprints and standards within a ‘mega’ programme for a greenfield bank. Ensured consistent IT architecture and applications matching business needs expressed through processes, functions, security and data and mapping these to the main IT components. Principal governance gateway for the approval of all project RFP responses and solutions architecture developed internally and externally prior to acceptance by the bank.
As Lead SOA Integration Architect, managed the integration of the banks applications using an SOA approach (IBM WPS, IIB, MQ, Webservices, SOAP, XML…) linking core banking (Temenos T24) functions with multiple channels (CRM (Temenos ARC), Branch, Internet, ATM, POS, IVR, SMS, Fax, eMail, Greeter) and other major applications, such as investment banking, payments (ACI Base 24, PM) and external partners such as SWIFT, VISA, SARIE, SADAD, REUTERS, TADAWUL and B2B.
courses: English - native | Italian - fluent Member of the British Computer Society (MBCS) IEEE Chartered Engineer (CEng) Certified IT Professional (CITP)