SEPA Experts in Germany

• Focus on optimizing and further developing the internal customer EBICS application
• Functional and technical consulting for Aareal First Financial Solutions AG on EBICS standard products and applications in the areas of operations and further development, as well as project-related communication with external development partners and the product manufacturer to implement the corresponding technical optimizations
• As the functional coordinator, providing advice on content-related and regulatory requirements as well as technical prerequisites and requirements, and bringing these together at the functional level
• Consulting on the use of EBICS formats
• Reviewing the current EBICS standard for optimization and further development potential
• Analyzing the current state to identify development potential and deriving appropriate recommendations for action while considering regulatory requirements
• Conducting EBICS tests throughout the project
• Functional responsibility for requirements management and, in this context, recording and documenting requirements for such tests
• Designing a functional and sustainable test management system
• Conducting and evaluating tests
• Consulting on sustainable quality assurance and audits
• Project language: German and English
• Tools/Methods: MS Project, MS Office, MS Visio, TestRail, Confluence, Jira, Business Logics Bankkrecher, Business Logics Test Data Generator, Business Logics Banking Tool, Business Logics Test System, DBEAVER, Squirrel, Unix Virtual Machines, WinSCP, Kitty, Putty, various Aareal Bank products, Online Banking Portal, Aareal Sign, core banking system, SAP Blue Eagle, SAP RE-FX, Aareon Wodis Sigma, Haufe Real Estate Wowinex, GAP Group Immotion, UTS Karthago, SAP IS-U/Waste, SIV kVASy, various EBICS clients

Strengthening digital operational resilience and strategically and operationally implementing DORA requirements. ICT risk management and governance; DORA-compliant ICT incident processes; digital operational resilience testing; outsourcing and ICT service provider management.

• Consulting, training and coaching in the financial sector on strategy, organization and IT topics

• MorgenFund: Advising the operator of a fund platform on software selection for a sub-ledger "Cash Accounts" based on virtual IBANs (VIBAN)

• Structuring requirements, market screening, preparing RfIs, communicating with vendors and conducting the selection process

• UniCredit/HypoVereinsbank: Workstream Lead "Booking and Customer Reporting" in the payment transformation project "PULS"

• Business analysis, preparing business requirements and coordinating the solution items as part of the functional specification with the bank's IT service providers

• Business analysis of SEPA CT and SWIFT MX (.camt-, .pain- and .pacs- formats), change management, team leadership for a virtual team of fifteen line experts and stakeholder management

• equensWorldline Germany: Program management for three projects of the SWIFT Service Bureau (CBPR+, ESMIG and Euro1Step1 migration) as part of the SWIFT MX migration

• Managing individual project leads with regard to cross-project goals and requirements; reporting to internal and external committees and stakeholders; coordination with dependent projects and programs

• Project management/PMO: Interim project management, deputizing for project leads, resource planning, budget and cost management, general PMO activities

Time-limited interim assignment filling a vacant program leadership position: joint leadership of a complex software project and orchestration of several agile teams (business, development, and DevOps teams), as well as actively driving change processes.

• Program Management & Planning: Responsibility for creating and updating milestone, resource, and budget plans to ensure project objectives using agile and hybrid methods.
• Cross-functional Collaboration: Promoting cooperation and knowledge sharing across teams; resolving blockers through proactive conflict management and targeted facilitation.
• Stakeholder Management & Transparency: Ensuring transparent and audience-appropriate communication within and outside the project organization using modern project management tools.

• Objective/Motivation: PAYONE urgently needs a 360° view of its customers. So far, PAYONE has had no company-wide master data strategy. It is not possible to identify customers across all relevant systems.

The organization is to be enabled to identify customers across all relevant systems. Establishing the basis for master data management at PAYONE

• Challenge: Due to company acquisitions, the system landscape is very heterogeneous. The company is highly dynamic and burdened with many system harmonization and integration projects, meaning that resource bottlenecks and changes in project priorities repeatedly create an almost impossible task.

Due to BaFin findings, the project has a central task and role. The first focus is the migration of all customers, including their AML/KYC data, from the master data backend systems to Salesforce. This is intended to resolve one of the largest findings and establish the corresponding ODD/EDD processes.

In addition, customer data must be harmonized in Salesforce. Previous migrations resulted in duplicate customer records in some cases. The aim is therefore to maintain only one customer in Salesforce and, using the relevant information from the backend systems, also be able to identify which products the customer uses and in which processing systems the customer obtains PAYONE services.

Project: ONE Customer

Budget: €1.5 million

Team: 10/30 employees (full-time/part-time); 4 vendors/providers

Integration: 8 (subsystems/interfaces)

Applications: Salesforce; SAP S4/HANA; in-house developments

Tools: MS Office; Jira, Confluence, SharePoint

Methods: Hands-on; Agile (SAFe); Prince2

CRM and revenue platform managing billing and subscription workflows.

• Scaled payments infrastructure across data products, direct debit expansion and automated abuse prevention, generating $416K in annualized operational savings ($8K/week) by eliminating redundant gateway calls.
• Owned backlog and sprint execution for autonomous checkout abuse detection pipelines, designing real-time risk guardrails and velocity heuristics that blocked card testing attacks.
• Architected enterprise billing migrator user stories and data reconciliation mechanisms, achieving zero-downtime subscription state transitions and cutting $60K in infrastructure overhead.
• Expanded European direct debit (SEPA) payment capabilities, managing cross-squad API dependencies and automated webhook error-handling to eliminate checkout friction.

• Customer portal – further development and release change

Technologies / Tools: Clarity, Microsoft 365 / MS Office (especially Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Teams), SharePoint, Helaba internal AI environment

• Team size: 32 people
• Approach: traditional project management
• Planning and management of updates to the customer portal of Wirtschafts- und Infrastrukturbank Hessen to the current manufacturer release
• Coordination of implementation in close cooperation with the manufacturer, portal operator, line organization and other stakeholders involved
• Setting up new test environments for migration and acceptance testing
• Planning of migrations and the required test levels and test procedures
• Creation of the go-live script as well as planning and coordination of cutover, hypercare and subsequent stabilization phases
• Planning the expansion of the portal to include electronic identification
• Planning, monitoring and continuous adjustment of the project plan
• Coordination of development, testing, release preparation and go-live
• Planning and moderation of regular project and coordination meetings
• Management reporting on project progress, risks and actions required
• Regular use of the Helaba internal AI environment to verify and assure the quality of work results and project documents

Methodology: Agile project management

Goal: Digitization and implementation of CCD2 requirements within the Consumer Finance systems.

Analysis, identification, and assessment of business requirements, as well as their transfer into technical implementation requirements. Coordination and status reporting of the various requirements. Documentation and process management using UML and BMPN. Cross-functional stakeholder management, UAT testing, data management, API architecture management.

Tools: Jira, Confluence, Visual Code, Sql Developer, Enterprise Architect, MsOffice, Bruno, ALM, Camunda, Figma

Transmission system operator – network provisioning platform (team lead)

• Designed the saga orchestrator in Python that provisions network fabrics with rollback.
• Split IP, identity, and resource allocation into bounded contexts with their own databases and typed clients.
• Implemented data access using DDD repositories and units of work, with no SQL in the domain code.
• Required integration tests using real PostgreSQL and RabbitMQ containers, and API fuzzing for every service.
• Introduced an agent workflow where a spec starts each change and a human approves every merge.
• Rolled out OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation through GitOps across eighteen Kubernetes clusters.
• Led incident response for stuck provisioning and recorded every outage as a post-mortem.

Languages and software used: Python, FastAPI, Pydantic v2, SQLAlchemy async, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Celery, pytest, testcontainers, schemathesis, Helm, Flux CD, GitLab CI, OpenTelemetry, pi coding agent.

Software product company – datacenter simulation SaaS (backend development)

• Built the asynchronous simulation pipeline as the second-largest contributor among more than twenty team members.
• Tagged every image by commit SHA and semver in the GitHub Actions deployment workflows.
• Diagnosed the RabbitMQ memory alarm that froze every simulation and fixed the limits in the Helm chart.
• Converted the test suite to function-style pytest, with coverage reported in every pipeline.

Languages and software used: Python, FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, Alembic, Celery, RabbitMQ, Redis, PostgreSQL, S3, EKS, Helm, Keycloak, GitHub Actions, pytest, mypy, ruff, SonarQube.

Internal AI platform – model serving and telemetry

• Built the FastAPI service that deploys open-weight models on GPU tiers as OpenAI-compatible endpoints.
• Upgraded production EKS by two Kubernetes minor versions and fixed zone-bound storage faults.
• Traced every model call, including its token count, cost, and latency, through the OpenTelemetry operator.

Languages and software used: Python, FastAPI, vLLM, LangGraph, pydantic-ai, OpenAI and Anthropic APIs, EKS, Helm, Flux CD, Terraform, GitLab CI, OpenTelemetry, Grafana.

Project: SCS (Settlement / Clearing Services)

Settlement platform serving multiple trading and clearing venues — counterparty risk safeguarding, settlement volume reduction, central risk management, and post-trade anonymity.

Technologies: Java 17, Spring Boot 3, Microservices, Spring Data JPA, SonarQube, Fortify (SCST), Mockito, Jenkins, OpenShift, Maven, Podman, GitHub, JIRA, Liquibase, Swagger, AMQP, Apache Camel, Terraform, PostgreSQL, Instana, Graylog.

• Identified and remediated CVEs in third-party libraries using SCA tooling, strengthening the security posture of production components.
• Maintained 90% code coverage with SonarQube, improving code quality and reducing production defects.
• Enabled mTLS for database authentication and message broker connections, enforcing encrypted, certificate-validated communication.
• Designed and deployed microservices with asynchronous, REST-based communication between components.
• Optimized a high-volume REST API (~200K requests) by reducing response time from 3s to 2s (33% improvement), boosting throughput and reliability under production load.
• Automated build and continuous integration pipelines using Maven and Jenkins.
• Orchestrated containerized workloads on Podman/OpenShift and governed schema evolution with Liquibase, ensuring reliable, repeatable deployments across all environments.
• Optimized Java code and implemented EHCache-based caching, improving application performance.
• Streamlined release management by governing application images, JAR versions, and dependencies through DBAG Artifactory, ensuring version consistency and audit traceability across environments

• Architecture and conception
• Development at gitis.de (Laravel, Vue, Blade, CI/CD Pipeline [Rector, PHPUnit, PHPStan, PHP_CodeSniffer])
• Development at plotdesk.app (Laravel, Vue, Inertia, Tailwindcss, Prism, Ansible, Docker, CI/CD Pipeline [Rector, Pest, PHPStan, Pint])
• Development at sales-automation.ai (Laravel, Vue, Inertia, Tailwindcss, Prism, CI/CD Pipeline [Pest, PHPStan, Pint])
• Development at Cynapsis Interactive (Laravel, Filament, Google Ads API, CI/CD Pipeline [Rector, Pest, PHPStan, Pint])
• Analysis and monitoring tool for z-optimations GmbH (Laravel, Blade)
• Development at ProgressMaker (Laravel, Pest, REST-API)
• Development of a data warehouse at ProgressMaker (Laravel)
• Development of SimpleStats.io (Laravel, Vue, Inertia, Tailwindcss, Pest, CI/CD)
• Development of Validation for Laravel (Laravel, Vue, Inertia, Tailwindcss)
• Development of multiple open-source projects (laravel-date-scopes, laravel-schema-rules, laravel-xhprof)

Implementation of anti-money laundering requirements under AMLA/KYC for an international major bank in Munich

Services provided:

• Clarification of the assignment and definition of the work package structure for the AMLA/KYC implementation project
• AI-supported project planning using a custom AI workflow for project management
• Preparation of the project management plan
• Resource and capacity planning
• Development of collaboration structures between the IT service provider and the bank client
• Agreement on responsibilities (RACI matrix)
• Management of 5 project members (core team)
• Project control, project monitoring, project reporting
• Communications management
• Escalation management
• Stakeholder management (11 stakeholders)
• Permanent member of the Steering Committee
• Project representation internally and externally
• Project reporting and management of decision-making bodies
• Project volume: 506 person-days (development effort)
• Risk management
• Quality management
• Organization and delivery of workshops

Methods: PMI PMBOK, EVM, GWG, DORA, BAIT, KANBAN, AML, AMLR, AMLA, GWG, KYC

IT environment: JIRA, Confluence, Sharepoint, Kantata Kimble, AI LLM Copilot, ChatGPT, anti-money laundering systems (custom-developed and SMARAGD)

• Close collaboration with development teams to ensure alignment with project objectives
• Assessment of in-scope assets, creation of requirements, and support of the public tender process through the selection of a provider
• Creation and maintenance of UML sequence diagrams to document system interactions
• Extensive use of Agile/Scrum methodology and Spotify model
• Development and implementation of cutover and dress rehearsal plans together with the application managers

• Designing and optimizing the end-to-end supply chain for a newly established restaurant, covering fresh produce, dry goods, beverages, and kitchen essentials
• Setting up ordering cycles, ensuring food-safety compliant logistics, and aligning delivery schedules with kitchen operations to maintain product quality and reduce waste
• Building procurement frameworks and vendor relationships with major importers and wholesalers in Germany; structuring agreements to secure competitive food pricing, negotiating minimum order quantities, and establishing reliable delivery commitments
• Defining structured processes for supplier evaluation, contract negotiation, and delivery scheduling to reduce risks such as delayed deliveries, inconsistent product quality, or stock shortages; introducing clear evaluation criteria, establishing communication protocols with vendors, and setting escalation procedures for supply disruptions