Experience
Yapily - Head of Technology Support
July 2019 - March 2022
- Spearheaded Yapilys Customer Support Service with a focus on providing excellent service. Reporting directly to CTO and engaging all heads-of department leads, defined and delivered continuous-improvement initiatives to meet the needs of a continually changing, constantly growing, fast-paced fintech start up.
- Engineered and implemented multiple solutions to provide an outstanding technology support service. [Zendesk, Salesforce, StatusPage, JIRA, Confluence, Looker, Slack]
- Improved change and release process to reduce outages by working with engineering leads to implement multiple continuous-improvement initiatives such as Blue/Green deployment, Auto-testing, Static Code Analysis, Feature Flags.
- Reduced fault detection and recovery times through engineering and implementation of ITIL based Incident Management processes [Google Cloud Monitoring and Logging (Stackdriver), Grafana, PagerDuty, Incident.io]
- Successfully delivered a high-risk integration project to ensure Yapily maintained business-continuity when the UK left the European Union. Migrated hundreds of bank registrations without customer impact.
NatWest Markets (5) - Service Desk Manager, Open Banking API
November 2017 - July 2019
- Established RBS Group’s Open-Banking Service Desk to provide front-door support for external Third Parties (TPPs: Account and Payment providers) and Internal Stakeholders (Operations, Technology, Risk, Audit etc)
- Enabled RBS to launch its Open Banking API service meeting regulatory mandated deadlines by performing all registration activities and delivery of key OBIE requested information.
NatWest Markets (4) - Ways of Working (WoW) DevOps Consultant
December 2016 - November 2017 | (1 year)
- Provided consultancy services to internal customers to help them deliver the Bank’s strategic enterprise-wide ‘Continuous Delivery’ transformation programme.
- Enabled customers to understand their DevOps maturity through authoring and delivery of a library of DevOps Maturity-Model literature.
- Delivered and facilitated ‘Continuous-Delivery’ and DevOps adoption workshops to help customers realise the benefits of adopting CI/CD initiatives.
- Empowered customers to reduce risk and quicken delivery cycle times through the creation of an ‘Automated Testing’ Community of Practice.
- Drove DevOps adoption within RBS ‘Finance Solutions’ organisation
- Delivered (fulfilling the CSM in a feature-team) the Bank’s first Continuous-Delivery MVP (Minimal Viable Product) helping both the customer and the bank achieve its intended business outcomes.
NatWest Markets (3) - Global Head of Middleware Operation, (Vice President)
August 2012 - November 2016 | (4 years 4 months)
- Global Head accountable for 24x7x365 operation of RBS complex and diverse mission-critical Middleware and Payments systems and execution of enterprise-wide strategic initiatives. Certified Category 1 change approver and Major Incident Escalation responder.
- Built and cultivated a global team to deliver ITIL Service Operations process including: Change Management, Incident Management, Problem Management and other ITIL processes
- Reduced operational risk through orchestration of business-continuity and disaster-recovery events, ensuring any identified issues were captured and resolved through the banks risk management process.
- Reduced annual running costs by £270k-a-year through implementing strategic offshoring whilst not impacting team morale or customer service.
- Delivered major integration project consolidating two banks technologies (ABN and RBS) on to a common middleware, enabling application simplification and cost reduction.
- Improved operational efficiency and governance through rollout of strategic ServiceNow implementation.
NatWest Markets (2) - Technical Team Lead, Middleware and Payment Systems
March 2008 - August 2012 | (4 years 6 months)
- Responsible for the day to day running of business as usual (BAU) and keep the show on the road (KSOR) activities for multiple middleware systems. Trained and mentored team members and acted as first-line escalation.
- KSOR/BAU Activities: Incident, Change & Problem Management, Request fulfilment, BCP/DR execution.
- Executed multiple high-profile Regulatory and Compliance audits (e.g. SOX)
- Reduced enterprise-wide operational costs and achieve strategic goals through execution of Application Consolidation, Server Virtualisation, Data-centre Exit and other similar projects.
- Rolled out Geneos implementation to monitor the Banks key applications and supporting infrastructure. Installed and configured Geneos Gateways and Netprobes on Windows, Solaris, and Linux hosts.
NatWest Markets (1) - Technical Support Engineer, Payment Systems
June 2003 - March 2008 | (4 years 6 months)
- Delivered 24x7x365 3rd-line tech-support for NatWests payment systems: Swift, CREST, EUCLID, TRAX, etc.
- Performed all BAU, KSOR support functions - Incident, Change, and Problem Management, BCP, DR, Audit etc
Publicis Sapient - Information Technology Consultant
June 1998 - June 2003 | (5 years)
- Delivered client outcomes for strategic dotcom projects including price comparisons sites (MoneyGator), travel portals (Odobo), and fintech-start-ups (FXMP)
University of Sussex - Full time educations
October 1994 - June 1998 | (3 years 9 months)
- Electronic Engineering with North American Studies (Masters)
BT - Telephone Engineer
February 1987 - September 1994 | (7 years 8 months)
- Delivered quality customer service through fixing and installing telephone systems and managing engineering teams.
Basidon ITEC - Youth Training Scheme Student
September 1985 - February 1987 | (1 year 5 months)
- Learned electronics, computing, business and office skills. Specialised in Electronic Engineering
Skills
Note: I think these sections are silly, but everyone seems to have one. Here is a *mostly* honest overview of my skills.
Education
Electronic Engineering with North American Studies (Masters)
University of Sussex, 1998
Selected Courses
00334871:
ITIL® Foundation certificate in IT Service Management
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00345591:
ITIL®Intermediate certificate in IT Service Operation
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00358022:
ITIL® Intermediate certificate in IT Service Design
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00375235:
ITIL® Intermediate certificate in IT Service Strategy
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00393360:
ITIL® Intermediate certificate in IT Continual Service Improvement
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00393360:
Microsoft Certified Azure Fundamentals
