Michael R.-Project Manager

• Goal/Motivation: As part of its digitalization and business process automation strategy, ING wants to drive the use of GenAI for extracting data from documents. The above project was initiated for this purpose, with the aim of using AI to read and process data from the building energy certificate as an MVP. The results delivered by the relevant GenAI LMM models (GPT-4o, Gemini, Claude, Mistral) were also to be compared.

• Challenge: The project is highly political. In addition, current governance rules and risk assessments are critical of a solution using GenAI. This is particularly true with regard to GDPR compliance when personal data is processed through an “externally” connected AI solution. The project is a strategic driver for deploying German ING GenAI solutions and obtaining the necessary “approvals” at group level.

Project: ValidatING

Budget: 3,0 Mio. €

Team: 10/50 employees (full-time/part-time); 2 vendors/providers

Integration: 3 (subsystems/interfaces)

Applications: SmartFix, OCR; AI-based application

Tools: MS Office; Jira, Confluence, Sharepoint

Methods: Hands-on; Prince2; BPMN

• Goal/Motivation: As part of an outsourcing arrangement, Commerzbank began outsourcing its entire payment transactions business to equensWorlddline in 2018. The goal of the transformation is to migrate the entire core payments business (SEPA ( SCT/SDD/SCC/cross-border payments) from the bank's legacy systems to equensWorldline's systems and move it to the new regulatory MX standard.

• Challenge: Following significant turnover among key stakeholders in management and the program on both sides, the program needed a new organization and plan.

• The program included 10 projects.

• I was tasked with setting up this organization, the processes, and the plan again, taking contractual agreements, compliance, and quality aspects (audits) into account.

Program: Commerzbank – Payment Transactions Outsourcing

Budget: 40 Mio. €

Team: 100/200 employees (full-time/part-time); 3 vendors/providers

Integration: 20 (subsystems/interfaces)

Tools: MS Office; MS Project; Jira, Confluence

Methods: Agile; Prince2; SAFe; Scrum; Kanban; BPMN

• Goal/Motivation: NSW is the bank’s data hub between transaction systems and the bank’s finance applications (SAP). With the Postbank migration, the data volume will increase to approximately 2.5 times its current size. In addition to developing migration interfaces for transferring the data, functional gaps had to be closed and system performance improved.

• Challenge: Data processing and delivery in the NSW application could NOT be delayed or take longer, as downstream processing in other systems had to meet strict delivery times for external parties (e.g. other banks, Bundesbank, ….).

Program: Unity (Postbank Integration) – Subproject “NSW”

Budget: 1,8 Mio. €

Team: 5/50 employees (full-time/part-time); 2 vendors/providers

Integration: 15 (subsystems/interfaces)

Tools: MS Office; MS Project; HPQC; Jira, Confluence

Methods: PMI; Waterfall

• 03.2015 – 12.2018 – Program – MiFID II:

• Goal/Motivation: MiFID II introduced additional regulatory requirements for the bank to protect consumers and provide customers with greater transparency in securities/investment transactions. This includes a breakdown of all types and components of costs and how they are composed during advice and offer preparation (enabling better comparisons) and investment execution.

• Challenge: On the IT side, the program included 10 projects and matrix workstreams for test management, process/system dependencies and service transition. MiFID II came into effect in January 2018. The program was scheduled to conclude at the end of 2018, following further follow-up work.

• MiFID II brought significant changes to more than 20 systems supporting the investment advice/order and reporting processes. The complexity was also increased by process and technology changes that were forward-looking and considered valuable in the continued development towards “digitalization”.

• 03.2018 – 12.2018 – Project Manager – MiFID II Customer Reports:

• Goal/Motivation: Responsible for implementing MiFID requirements in investment reporting. The business scope covered the regulatory implementation of portfolio and cost reporting.

• Challenge: Took over a crisis project: the portfolio reporting solution, put into production at the end of 2017, did not work during the pilot and had to be made production-ready by the end of April 2018. In addition, the team had to be restructured, while two follow-up releases for 2018 had to be planned and delivered in parallel.

• 03.2017 – 02.2018 – Project Manager – MiFID II Advisory Process:

• Goal/Motivation: Responsible for implementing MiFID requirements in the investment advisory business. The business scope covered the regulatory implementation of the PRIIPs requirement, the new ex-ante cost disclosure and the related advisory processes via the frontend.

• Challenge: Due to the complexity and scope, the requirements were split into 2 parallel projects. The remaining time, prioritization of the business “must haves” and cross-project business/technical dependencies were key challenges.

• I also took on the role of test manager for this project. The tight timeline and scope of the business requirements called for a different testing approach to achieve the goal and mitigate risk. I coordinated and introduced the test concept and its organizational integration. This resulted in cost savings of around 850T€.

• 11.2015 – 07.2017 – Application Manager:

• Responsible on behalf of IT Operations in the program for a central system with at least one direct communication interface to approximately 20 systems. Provided operating systems and implemented the required IT infrastructure and architecture changes. Ensured a smooth go-live across the program and coordinated with Release/Transition Management and Production Support.

• Within the program, I supported 5 projects that mainly involved changes to core components of the central system. My responsibilities included synchronizing and bundling changes across projects, and identifying and managing project dependencies. As Application Manager, I was involved throughout the entire lifecycle of requirements and changes for the central system. I reviewed all business and detailed specifications and approved technical documentation and Operation Instructions. The central system provides functions, services and data to frontends and backend systems supporting core customer advisory and documentation processes, order processing, transaction reporting and portfolio management. This also gave me extensive knowledge of the system’s core functions and end-to-end processes.

• In addition, drawing on my expertise and experience with large, complex IT projects, I supported the program’s central team responsible for process and system dependencies. This involved creating transparency around which projects needed to change which systems, which system interfaces needed to be adapted or newly developed, and which systems needed to be connected for the first time. It also involved identifying the types of interfaces (Realtime, Batch, ………), and determining whether these changes resulted in new or changed service levels or Non Functional Requirements. I fed the analysis results back into the projects as requirements for implementation.

Program: MiFID II - Securities Business

Budget: 150,0 Mio. € (program) / 2,0 – 5,0 Mio. € (project)

Team: up to 250 employees (program) / 7-15/30-50 employees (project); 3 vendors/providers

Integration: 40 (program) / 5 (project)

Tools: MS Office; MS Project; HPQC; Jira, Confluence

Methods: PMI; Waterfall; Scrum; BPMN

• Goal/Motivation: Ikano Bank GmbH acquired a consumer loan portfolio from a bank. It consists of 30.000 customers with a total value of approximately 280 Million Euro. This expands Ikano’s product portfolio. The acquisition also contributes to the bank’s planned inorganic growth.

• Challenge: The acquisition had to be completed in 2014, as the selling bank wanted to remove the portfolio from its books by the end of the year.

The affected service employees of the selling bank were not transferred as part of the purchase. Neither party wanted a “transfer of business”.

Due to the tight timeline, a “direct” migration to the bank’s own systems was not possible. The service provider hosting the portfolio could no longer support a “tenant migration” in 2014. The product was new to Ikano, so there were no “existing” processes to use. It was also not possible to hire customer service staff across all departments in the short time available.

Project: Gold – Transition of Consumer Loan Portfolio

Budget: 5,0 Mio. €

Team: 5/40 employees (full-time/part-time); 8 vendors/providers

Integration: 5 (subsystems/interfaces)

Tools: MS Office; MS Project

Methods: Hands-on

• Goal/Motivation: Introduce a customer portal for customer self-services and provide invoice data and reports. Until then, 50.000 customers had received their invoices via bank statements (recognized by the tax authorities). With the SEPA format (introduced in Dec. 2013), this was no longer possible because the necessary information could no longer be included.

• Challenge: The project had already been running for 2.5 years. It was led by the product manager, who changed twice during this period. Go-live dates were postponed several times from 2012 through mid-2013. Requirements were constantly added and changed. IT systems had not been specified or built as part of the architecture. With the upcoming introduction of SEPA, customers would no longer receive invoices.

Project: myeasycash

Budget: 450.000 €

Team: 3/15 employees (full-time/part-time); 2 vendors/providers

Integration: 3 (subsystems/interfaces)

Tools: MS Office; MS Project; HPQC

Methods: Hands-on

• Goal/Motivation: Under the Herkules contract, BWI was commissioned as a service provider for the German Armed Forces to convert all telecommunications to VoIP. It was also tasked with developing software that would largely automate updates to telecommunications and all German Armed Forces-owned systems involved in “provisioning” when a site was relocated. BWI commissioned T-Systems to carry out the work. When I took over the project, the telecommunications system had already been installed in a star topology according to the security requirements and configured for operation. The remaining work was to complete the software, test it, implement it in BWI’s IT environment, and integrate it with the subsystems. In addition, the rollout of the telecommunications components and end devices (approx. 300.000 units) across the sites (approx. 1.000) had to be planned and carried out.

• Challenge: By the end of 2011, the project was considered a failure because the software delivered in October 2011 contained too many errors and could not be put into operation. In January 2012, a decision was made to redesign the software and reorganize and replan the project. The new software had to be developed within 9 months, with the rollout to all sites starting in 07/2012 and ending in 12/2013. A penalty of 1 Mio. € would apply both to the software delivery milestone and to the end of the rollout. The contract partners were at the highest level of escalation and in conflict. Internally, there was no project support because the departments could not agree on responsibilities and who would cover the additional costs.

Subprogram: Sofia (German Armed Forces Herkules program)

Budget: 60 Mio. € (approx. 50 Mio. hardware, 10 Mio. software development)

Team: 20/150 employees

Integration: 5 (subsystems/interfaces)

Tools: MS Office; MS Project

• Goal/Motivation: Commerzbank intended to outsource the partial processing of its credit card portfolio (1,5 Milionen credit cards) from First Data (formerly GZS) to full processing. Commerzbank also switched processors from First Data to ATOS Worldline.

• Challenge: 100% replication of existing functions, interfaces and reporting. No changes to the card products. The migration and processor switch had to take place while operations were ongoing. Cards issued to end customers had to remain usable. Uninterrupted card use (24/7) had to be ensured. The switch between card organizations (VISA/MasterCard) could take no more than a few seconds.

• Politically, the strategy at Commerzbank was driven by the business. The technical department opposed this decision and acted accordingly, resisting the project. A high level of conflict management was required. First-time introduction of a real-time interface on the ATOS Worldline mainframe system.

Client: Commerzbank - Credit Card Migration

Budget: 2,3 Mio. €

Team: up to 20/100 employees (full-time/part-time); 4 vendors/providers

Integration: 10 (subsystems/interfaces)

Tools: MS Office; MS Project

Methods: Hands-on; Prince2

• Goal/Motivation: Motoversum was the 3rd portal to be developed, after Jobversum and Immoversum. This portal was the strategic implementation of an integrated software framework, to which the other two portals were to be migrated later.

• Challenge: Versum.de was a new economy company that had been “built from scratch.” As a result, the error rate was high and strategic decisions were not always right. Compared with the other portals, Motoversum had only ¼ of the budget available; at the same time, the software architecture had to be modular and reusable. There was also significant time pressure, as all three portals had to be live by the end of 2000. Accordingly, the company founders (the 10 largest publishing houses in Germany) had high expectations and paid close attention.

Portal development (Motoversum)

Budget: 1,5 Mio. €

Team: 5/30 employees (full-time/part-time); 1 vendor/provider

Integration: 5 (subsystems/interfaces)

Tools: MS Office; MS Project

• Full coordination and replacement of hardware and software as part of the euro and year 2000 issues, including the selection of the relevant service providers and software/data migration.

Euro / Y2K

Budget: up to 1,0 Mio. €

Team: up to 2/10 employees (full-time/part-time); 4 vendors/providers

Integration: up to 10 (subsystems/interfaces)