Andrew Elmore BEng CEng CITP MIET MBCS

Profile

• Chief Technical Officer & Engineering Manager with experience ranging from start-ups to multinationals. Managed multi-site teams and departments of up to 60 engineers across EMEA, Asia Pacific & the US with annual budgets in excess of 8 million GBP. Experienced in effective usage and leadership of on & offshore development as well as outsourcing.
• Successfully developed & deployed highly scalable and robust enterprise, hosted & desktop software solutions into multiple markets, including financial services, retail & telcos through a combination of agile, iterative & traditional development methodologies.
• Accomplished speaker, communicator & negotiator who has engaged with key stakeholders at up to executive level within the world's most prestigious financial institutions.
• Enthusiastic, professional & commercially-focused leader, blending engineering best-practice with innovation to create new business opportunities and deliver world-class products. Capable in both technically hands-on and off roles.

Key Achievements

• Built and run engineering departments across Europe, the Americas & India, including recruitment and definition/implementation of operating processes.
• Led technical due diligence operations in support of acquisitions, company sales & IPOs.
• Led the development and launched numerous financial products, including mobile, internet & card-based payment systems for clients such as PayPal, Everything Everywhere/Orange & Ericsson.
• Development & delivery of SmartStream's TLM WebConnect, the key enabling technology behind SmartStream's SaaS (onDemand) offering. WebConnect opened up hosted subscription/per-transaction charging models, enabling SmartStream's clients to deliver customer self-service and insourcing services.
• Excellent response from the industry to the functionality, performance & quality of delivered solutions, including awards and recognition from Financial-I, Inside Reference Data, TowerGroup, Waters et al.
• Technology speaker at events including SpringOne 2GX, QCon and GOTO.
• Developed the transaction processing component of British Telecom's high volume call routing system.

Key Employment Summary

2017 -	VP Engineering	Velo Payments
2011 - 2017	Chief Technology Officer & Head of Development	C24 Limited & Incept5 Limited
2013 - 2014	Head of Engineering	Secondment to BBC Worldwide
2009 - 2011	Head of Development	PrePay Solutions
2003 - 2009	Senior Development Manager	SmartStream Technologies Limited
2002 - 2003	Head of Development & Chief Technical Architect	IntroNet Applications Limited
1997 - 2002	Head of New Development / Principal Engineer	Quadstone / Portrait Software
1996 - 1997	Lead Software Engineer	3Com

Employment Details

Velo Payments

Velo is revolutionising how people get paid by putting the recipients in charge of how and where they receive their funds. Velo's bank-grade, rails-agnostic platform allows corporates to pay beneficiaries rather than accounts, enabling transparent & frictionless payments to banks, digital wallets and more. The platform is hosted by banks (both on-prem & in the cloud) as well as available via a SaaS model.

VP Engineering 2017 -

Achievements

• Built and leading a 50-strong Engineering department covering front & back-end development, QA, DevOps (including running the production systems) and client integration.
• Microservices architecture & Docker-based deployment gained numerous commendations during independent audits and external ethical hacking penetration tests.
• Undertook technical due diligence of the world's largest non-bank payment network including detailed assessment of functional capability, technical quality, staff expertise, licensing & running costs. Formulated an operating and modernisation plan to support an acquisition business & investment case.
• Enabling tier 1 banks to undertake a digital modernisation of legacy payment platforms, leveraging existing bank capabilities and the Velo platform to open new markets and adapt to marketplace models.
• Contributed to and oversaw the development of a hybrid blockchain solution, providing irrefutable audit trails while complying with legislation (e.g. GDPR).

Responsibilities

• All Engineering staff & processes.
• Create a payments platform which removes friction inherent in current payment processes by transparently integrating bank and digital payment rails, as well as removing the restrictions which result in reconciliation challenges and opaque money movements.
• Work with Sales, Marketing & Product Management to ensure that the development approach & roadmap supports the sales pipeline and we are capitalising on our platform & differentiators.
• Balance innovation & stability to ensure Velo remains at the technical forefront, while meeting all bank security, stability, reliability, scalability, regulatory and operability requirements.
• Engage with blue-chip clients and banks to deliver compelling visions of an integrated architecture which enhances and compliments their existing systems.
• Ensure client success by making Velo's UIs & APIs intuitive and efficient, as well as providing 'white glove' service where needed.

C24 & Incept5 Limited

C24 is a market & thought leader in the application of technology to the financial services sector. Its inaugural product, Integration Objects, leads the market in enabling clients to integrate with external systems using both standard and bespoke message protocols. More recent innovations, such as Preon & the Preon Data Platform address organisations' needs to process and understand ever greater volumes of data in real-time. Its sister company Incept5 Limited is a software architecture consulting business specialising in technology incubation for innovative solutions and strategic development programmes.

Chief Technology Officer / Head of Development 2011 - 2017

Achievements

• Towards the end of 2016 we sold C24 to Gresham Technologies. I remained with the business to integrate C24's products, platforms and processes with Gresham's, as well as to help formulate the architecture and technology stack for the Clareti Data Accelerator.
• Led technical partnerships and integrations with numerous organisations including Oracle, SpringSource, Pivotal, RedHat, MongoDB, Hortonworks, Hazelcast, Gigaspaces, VMware & Mulesoft.
• Formulated and architected C24's Preon technology, enabling complex messages to be queried faster and with a far smaller memory footprint. Preon typically reduces big data infrastructure needs by over 10x and speeds up coordination in distributed systems. Created the Preon Data Platform to enable in-memory compute over huge data volumes, both on-premise and in the cloud.
• Creating & driving the adoption of blockchain & smart contracts ecosystems in financial services, reducing trade impedance while simplifying regulatory compliance.
• Secondment to BBC Worldwide as Head of Engineering for Consumer Digital Technology, covering brands such as BBC.com, TopGear.com & the Global iPlayer. Architect for BBC Store (Project Barcelona) - BBC's transactional video on demand platform.
• Architectural & development consultancy to clients including Apple (Online Store & iOS teams in Cupertino & UK on distributed message-based architectures & RabbitMQ) & HSBC (transparent integration of in excess of 180 discrete systems).
• Speaker at industry and technology conferences/events including SpringOne 2GX Washington DC (Building for Performance with Spring Integration & Spring Batch), QCon London & New York (Financial Big Data - Loosely Coupled, Highly Structured. NoSQL panelist & High Volume Data Transformation) and GOTO Denmark (Practical Enterprise Integration).

Responsibilities

• Technical strategy and all Engineering staff.
• Evolution of C24's products, team & processes to ensure we continue to out-perform our clients' volume, latency & capability requirements.
• Working with multiple clients to supplement their development capabilities, typically through the injection of technical experts with previous domain experience.
• Providing coaching & training to enable clients to reliably scale both existing and planned systems to highly available, fault tolerant architectures across multiple data centres and in the cloud.

PrePay Solutions

Jointly owned by Mastercard & Edenred, PrePay Solutions provides electronic, stored-value solutions across a variety of sectors including retail, mobile, insurance, corporate incentive & government. Our servers process billions of dollars worth of transactions annually.

Head of Development 2009 - 2011

Owner of product scope & development for all front & middle office operations.

Achievements

• Successful delivery of numerous payment solutions involving innovative integration with client platforms, including OrangeCash (Everything Everywhere), PayPal Access Card, Ericsson Money, Edenred, HMV, Game & Swedbank Babs.
• Implemented processes & architected platform to achieve PCI-DSS level 2 compliance.

Responsibilities

• Shaping & implementing corporate strategy through innovation & technical leadership.
• Management & leadership of UK & Polish development teams.
• Engaging with current & prospective clients to build a shared vision & technical strategy, driving the sales process.
• Introducing & improving internal processes to increase robustness of the development group, enabling the next phase of the company's growth.
• Defining technical & deployment architectures to ensure scalability, resilience & continuous operation. Supplementing the system core (J2EE/Spring & Oracle) with web, batch & web services interfaces for customer interaction and connectors for financial networks (Mastercard, bespoke point-to-point etc).
• Maintenance of a functional roadmap, prioritising customer, sales & internal requirements and managing expectations.
• Enforcing clear segregation of responsibilities, necessary to comply with industry regulation.

Self Employed

During my exclusivity period after leaving SmartStream I provided technical leadership & interim CTO services to software development organisations.

Technical Consultant 2009

Achievements

• Reprioritised and managed scope for a major European tender winner to ensure an on-time delivery & successful customer engagement. Provided technical expertise in the negotiation of client requirements avoiding restrictive platform tie-in.
• Designed & developed a C++/Java web service bridge, rearchitecting the product suite into a service-orientated, rather than database-centric, solution. Significantly improved scalability, reduced development times & enabled collaborative hosting for multiple clients.
• Assisted with the recruitment of a permanent CTO.

SmartStream Technologies Limited

SmartStream is the global, market-leading provider of Straight Through Processing (STP) solutions to over 1000 of the world's leading financial institutions, and is the third largest private software company in Europe.

Senior Development Manager 2003 - 2009

Leading and enabling SmartStream's technical strategy and running their WebConnect, Control and Corporate Actions products, as well as the Technical Services department. Line managed up to 40 engineers in the UK, USA, India & Austria and worked with outsourcing providers to increase agility. Provided leadership to 100+ developers.

Achievements

• Developing the software that underpins middle and back office services at leading financial institutions, such as Citi, JP Morgan Chase, Santander & HSBC, handling millions of transactions and events per day.
• Instrumental in establishing the AJAX/browser-UI application market, pioneering such techniques with TLM Webconnect which replicated the ergonomics and performance its thick client counterpart.
• Secured new clients (including Citi & Macquarie) by selling SmartStream's technical pedigree demonstrating architectural ROI.
• Quickly assumed responsibility, and grew the development capacity for TLM Corporate Actions following a dramatic increase in the sales pipeline. Relocated core development to the UK to reduce costs and improve product quality. Applied both Agile & iterative methodologies to maximise the output of the UK team and out-sourced resources.
• Following SmartStream's acquisition of Connextive, instrumental in transforming their Indian operation into a viable development centre by recruiting key technical personnel and establishing operating processes.
• Took managerial & technical control of WebConnect during its early stages as an R&D product and drove it to becoming a core part of all SmartStream sales. WebConnect now houses all of SmartStream's products, providing a seamless user-experience.

Responsibilities

• Product architect. Delivering innovative Java-based systems whilst maintaining legacy C++ software.
• Full lifecycle management of products & projects across multiple teams (development & service delivery).
• Leading, motivating & managing global development teams.
• Technical input to the product management & business development decision processes, creating and responding to existing and emerging markets.
• Technical input to the sales process (proposal preparation, client presentations & contract review). This included technical direction for the integration of SmartStream's products with clients' existing systems.

IntroNet Applications Limited

IntroNet provides a global recruitment service, based around its online candidate application capture & tracking service. Used by blue chip companies worldwide, IntroNet's servers deliver multi-lingual, 24/7 availability.

Head of Development & Chief Technical Architect 2002 - 2003

Headhunted to resolve problems in IntroNet's development process which had seen 3 generations of the product released with similar flaws and limitations, restricting the company's ability to onboard new clients.

Managed a team of 11 engineers and team leaders, defining the technical strategy and vision for the company.

Achievements

• Quickly identified & fixed core issues leading to development failures. Restructured team & processes and changed the interaction model to empower product management.
• Successfully directed the expansion of the service to new companies across multiple countries.

Responsibilities

• Engaging with commercial managers to ensure technical capabilities were aligned with business requirements.
• Owned all development functions & processes, including continuous operation of the live site.
• Providing leadership to the team including mentoring & reviews, coupled with hands-on architecture, design & implementation of the J2EE-based service.

Quadstone Limited (now Pitney Bowes)

Quadstone is the market leader in customer behaviour modelling software. Founded out of the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, Quadstone maintains an expertise in scalable software solutions. Their flagship product "The Quadstone System" (now Portrait Customer Analytics) is used by some of the largest retail, financial and telecommunications companies worldwide.

Head of New Development 2001 - 2002

Managed a team of 7 principal and senior engineers across 4 projects.

• Developed a J2EE-based deployment of The Quadstone System enabling Quadstone to expand from an ISV into the ASP arena, and yielding a partnership with Forrester.
• Project & technical management of both blue sky R&D and well-defined functionality.

Principal Engineer & Team Leader 2001

Managed the Client & Middleware development team.

• Evolved The Quadstone System from a monolithic application into a client-server solution. Developed the Java Swing clients and innovative middleware to bridge them to the C++ server.
• As Principal Engineer, provided technical leadership and mentoring across the company.

Systems Architect / Software Engineer 1997 - 2001

Responsible for the infrastructure for the Decisionhouse, Actionhouse and Transactionhouse product sets. Maintained, performance-tuned and ported highly parallel C/C++ application to multiple platforms.

• Gained deep understanding of hardware architecture, parallelism, performance and OS fundamentals.
• Company C++, OOAD & MS Windows guru.

3Com (Network Management Division)

3Com is a multi-national producer of networking products. The network management division (based in Edinburgh) was at the forefront of the drive for standardisation of management protocols such as RMON2

Lead Software Engineer 1996 - 1997

Lead Software Engineer on 3Com's network management software 'LANsentry Manager for Windows'.

• Rescued 3Com's traffic path analysis functionality from being scrapped during the early stages of its implementation due to a fundamental technical flaw. Brought in to assist during a crisis meeting, I devised a novel use of the TTL field to allow traces from multiple stations to be merged into a single path.

British Telecom PLC

Student (Vacation) Engineer 1993 - 1995

• Achievements include developing the transaction processing component of BT's call routing software and membership of BT's Design Consultancy team.

Qualifications & Affiliations

Professional	Chartered Engineer (CEng) Chartered Information Systems Engineer Chartered Information Technology Practitioner (CITP) Member of The Institute of Engineering & Technology (MIET) Member of The British Computer Society (MBCS)
Academic	BEng Computer Science & Electronics (2:1 Hons), University of Edinburgh (1996) S-Level: Mathematics (Distinction) A-Level: Mathematics (A), Physics (A), Chemistry (B)
Other	Full Driving Licence (Clean)

Skills

Management	Technical & Product Strategy, People Management, Team Building & Development, Project Management and Scheduling, Offshore/Remote Team Management, Development Methodologies including Agile (Scrum, DSDM, XP), Rational Unified Process (RUP) & traditional (Waterfall)
Design	UML, Booch, CRC, Patterns (e.g. GoF, Sun J2EE blueprint, dependency injection & IoC)
Programming Languages	Java [18 years], C/C++ [20+ years], Scala, JavaScript, 68000
Technologies	J2EE, XML & XSLT, (X)HTML, Javascript & CSS, Spring (including Boot, Integration, Batch, MVC & Security), Quarkus, JNI & RMI, RMON & SNMP, SQL, MFC, Swing, ATL, (D)COM, SOAP, SSO, Camel/Fuse, Mule
Development Tools	Git, Jenkins, CVS, Subversion, Tomcat, WebLogic, WebSphere, Maven, Ant, Gradle, Eclipse, Visual C++
OS & Deployment	Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, Unix (Solaris, HPUX, DGUX, AIX, MP-RAS, Dynix/ptx, Linux et al), Windows (3.1 to 10), macOS
Grids, Databases & NoSQL	PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase, MySQL, H2, MongoDB, GemFire (Apache Geode), Gigaspaces XAP, Redis, Coherence, Hazelcast, Apache Spark, Hadoop
Languages	Going back quite a long time now, however French (previously fluent), Spanish (elementary)

Interests

Many & varied, including squash, music (Grade 6 pianist), weightlifting, football, cricket, golf, reading & photography.