experience

Presales support and business analysis for the UK’s largest payments provider, focusing on SEPA solutions:
• Worked with product managers and IT architects to produce bid responses, including requirements analysis
• Participated in workshops during customer engagements
• Managed the knowledge base, branded collateral and FAQ used by the sales team

Performed a short-term contract based in Qatar, with part of the duties performed offsite in London. Analysis of the bank’s trade finance operation and its interfaces with SWIFT, the Qatari Central Bank and enterprise systems such as SAP and Embargo. Implementation of some of the solutions identified during the analysis stage.

Ran development, implementation and maintenance of a search-technology-based data aggregation system, deployed to feed data to a banking portal. Tracking of new technological research, and evaluation of whether and how this research could be applied to improve the system's functionality. This includes open-source and licensed products that are mainly used in the fields of text-based data-mining, classification and front-end visualisation.

• Conducted a study into providing a solution for SEPA PSD (Credit Transfer and Direct Debit instruments).
• Reduced development costs by setting up an in-house offshore development centre providing a basis for additional revenues.
• Ran the implementation at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, development and integration of a full compliance and account officer research system. Integrated data from 6 legacy systems and 15 external web sources.
• Managed the phase-1 implementation at Building Design Partnership, integrating and categorising documents and CAD files from 10 offices into a SharePoint 2007 portal.
• Implemented a document compliance project at General Atlantic, a major VC company. Ensured that all documents and emails from offices in three countries were indexed and searchable, to meet litigation compliance requirements.
• Produced functional specifications for the compliance rules-engine, credit analysis modules, data integration modules and dashboards.
• Built a high quality product development team able to work to tight deadlines within serious budget constraints.
• Awarded a percentage of the company as recognition of my services and achievements.

Led the Product Management team, which was responsible for overall functionality direction of IMEX, a world-leading Trade Finance and Global Banking solution. This role included both management and hands-on work, primarily assisting the sales team, from RFP responses, through gap analysis workshops, and following through the product customisations to successful implementations.
• Managed a redesign of the product, to ensure that all Trade and Payment messages complied with SWIFT standards. This included visiting SWIFT HQ at La Hulpe to discuss the project and to accredit the product.
• Managed pre-sales staff and systems analysts, overseeing functional scope and design of the product, carrying out change-design from the pre-sales stage with customers through to the QA stage.
• Streamlined implementation and product design procedures, and ensured that the organisation complied with these procedures.
• Performed account management for two key customers – Deutsche Bank (New York) and ABSA (Johannesburg).
• Headed a development team, which developed the Bank Guarantees product module and added other features to existing Trade Finance modules. All work was done to specification and passed UAT on schedule.

• Turned around two implementations that were underperforming back on track, and reorganised the whole project to enable the system to successfully go live. The work overhead was massive, including standardising and rationalising configurations involving thousands of table settings.
• Responsible for designing the financial interfaces between Société Générale legacy systems and the trade finance product that was implemented at the bank. This was a complex exercise that included the accounting interfaces and outgoing and incoming SWIFT and Telex interfaces.
• Responsible for design of workflow functionality, which was implemented at Deutsche Bank. Managed the whole process involving everything from meeting users and writing the design documents needed to meet their requirements to gaining senior user acceptance and sign-off.
• Implemented Surecomp’s core product and integrated IMEX onsite at a number of further customers worldwide, managing or “hands-on involvement over the whole process. This involved business analysis of requirements and setup of parameters; specification and development of interfaces to bank systems; liaising with bank’s users and developers, and planning of the implementations.