Jarosław Sobel
I'm an experienced IT architect and manager with over 16 years of experience (since 2003) in the IT industry and the banking sector.
I started my professional career as an author and developer of CRM system (including features like loan underwriting and loan collection support). This platform was dedicated to polish credit unions. As part of my duties, I also served as a business analyst and being a leader of a 8-person development team.
In the following years I was the IT manager at the credit union.
In 2011, I started working for ING Bank Śląski. I was responsible for the development of the bank's virtualisation platform. In the last year of my work in this organisation, I was the Lead architect of a private cloud project (Zero Touch 2.0).
Currently, I am the Head of Core Services at Vodeno and the Product Owner of the platform's core banking and transactional system. I'm responsible for the architecture of backend applications (at the business and technical level).
I'm a blogger, conference speaker and author of numerous publications in the IT magazine.
SPEECHES
How to build a Bank in a year on GCP? History of VODENO and AION Bank
Over 4 years ago we started the Vodeno project. 3 years ago, our banking platform was launched in the GCP public cloud for the Friends & Family phase. In November 2019, we successfully completed the complete migration of the Belgian bank (Aion) to our cloud. We have already talked about "how to build a bank in the cloud" many times. Almost 3 years have passed since then. The platform has expanded and 4 countries are already operating (Belgium, Poland, Germany and Sweden). During these 3 years, the company's strategy changed and the application layer also changed. In retrospect, we know that apart from these good architectural decisions, there were also those that were wrong (theoretically good at a given moment in time) - for example: separate environments for each country. We are currently running a project called Multibranding, i.e. combining these separate entities one common.
Business has changed as well. Aion is currently focusing on offering its financial services not in direct mode (so-called organic growth) but through partners in the BaaS model (Banking-as-a-Service), who enrich their services with Aion's financial products. From a technological point of view, this way of development also required the definition of new architectural standards (e.g. a consistent and efficient API for BaaS partners) and was a challenge in itself.
If you want to find out in detail what challenges we had, how we managed to address them and what we learned along the way, we invite you to our lecture.
Also check out our interview at Google where we talk about building a bank in the cloud.