Corporate Experience
IT and Telecom
Engineer at Lucent/Avaya
Architected and designed several large call centres delivering multi-channel customer engagement and integration into corporate systems (ERP, CRM etc.)
Proposed, designed and led the development of a call centre management system integrating call routing, interactive voice response, agent screens etc. accelerating market access by three years.
The Java-based system was highly flexible, with modules deployable to multiple nodes (stand-alone servers, IVRs, etc.) to enable load sharing and high reliability. At the core, I designed and implemented an integration/orchestration backbone that coordinated modules across nodes, carried the call context ("information basket"), and executed call-control decisions (routing, IVR and CTI handoffs). This ensured that user-entered data, agent actions, and existing data from CRM/ERP systems stayed collated and available throughout each call.
Developer at IBM Business Partner
Designed and developed a GUI framework for an IBM AS/400 (now iSeries)-based telecom operating support system.
Existing GUI wrappers generated a screen that looked like the terminal page, but with Windows GUI elements.
The core concept was to take the data that would be inserted into the 5250 terminal screens and populate a separately designed window or dialog, following GUI design principles. As such, the same application could either be used with traditional 5250 terminals and terminal emulators or a new GUI could be designed independently, whilst using the exact same data packets, requiring minimal backend change.
In addition, I co-authored three books on the IBM OS/2 operating system and developed courses for IBM to deliver to their corporate users on the then-new business tool, the Internet, and the OS/2 operating system.
Financial Services
Global Head of Automation and Reporting, Client Onboarding, at Citi
The Institutional Clients Group (ICG) served the largest global corporates spanning practically all jurisdictions globally. Establishing the legally accepted authority for executives across all the subsidiaries and offices of these global corporates is possibly the most complex operational challenge, as it requires adherence to not just each jurisdiction, but also to US laws and regulations, as well as others, like the EU, considering for example an Indonesian subsidiary of a German legal entity of a US corporation.
I led the programme to consolidate multiple regional onboarding systems into a single global platform, enabling end-to-end workflow manageability, transparency, and case tracking across regions. The target state was delivered on IBM Business Process Manager (BPM, WebSphere), with substantial enhancements beyond the base product to fit the operating model and regulatory needs.
My main stakeholders included the broader Product team responsible for CitiDirect, the Operations teams using the system, internal Technology teams, and the delivery contractor team. The redesign had a $20m annual technology budget and ran for over two years, concluding in a successful deployment.
Audit Director, Franchise Audit, at Citi
In addition to audit work, I built two key computer-aided audit tools (CAATs) in a highly restrictive environment: the information was highly sensitive, falling under Citi's Confidential (or higher) restrictions, and we needed to move fast without being able to build new server-side systems. I used the universally available Microsoft Office toolchain (Access, Excel, Word, VBA) to create controlled, repeatable workflows for data consolidation and report generation.
The franchise audits, which reviewed Citi's operations in each presence country, were staffed by non-auditor senior executives, and were very intense 1-2-week, high stakes engagements. All audit reports were circulated to Citigroup ExCo and the regulators.
- Country information pack generator: consolidated holistic, integrated financial, operational, and controls information for each country Citi operates in, sourcing data from diverse systems and producing coherent, repeatable, easy-to-use reports.
- Personalised audit programme pack generator: replaced large Excel-based tables to fill out with pre-generated Word templates, reducing mistakes and incomplete audits while improving quality and delivery time.
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