Neil Crow's CV

• Email: crow.neil@gmail.com
• Location: East Sussex, UK
• Website: crowne.github.io
• LinkedIn: neilcrow
• GitHub: crowne
• StackOverflow: 97745/crowne

Executive Summary

Systems Architect

Systems architect with 30+ years leading the design and evolution of financial systems across banking, capital markets, securities settlement, trading, reconciliation, and ledger platforms.

Extensive experience in both realtime and batch processing environments from ETL's to distributed and event-driven architectures, messaging systems, high-availability environments and large-scale system integration. Well versed in designing fault-tolerant services, financial source-of-truth platforms, and operational workflows under regulatory scrutiny.

Hands-on technical leader with a proven track record of owning complex systems end-to-end, defining well organised and scalable architectures, mentoring engineers, and partnering with business, operations, and compliance stakeholders.

Education

University of South Africa, Information Technology and Computer Science

BSc

Nov 2011

Software Engineering Stream

University of South Africa, National Certificate in Data Metrics

NC

Oct 2006

• cum laude

Certifications

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate

May 2026

Sun Certified Java Programmer

June 2002

National Diploma in Structured COBOL Programming

Nov 1994

Courses

Tibco - EMS301 Enterprise Messaging Service

June 2007

Tibco - BW611 BusinessWorks Integration

June 2007

Informatica - Data Integration (ETL)

Sept 2007

Platinum Education - SQL Programming for DB2

June 1996

IBM - CICS Command Level Coding

June 1995

IBM - CICS Advanced Application Coding

June 1995

Cobol Programming - Advanced Structured Cobol

Nov 1992

Experience

Apex Group, Systems Architect

London, UK

June 2023 – present

3 years 4 months

via MJ Hudson acquisition, built holtara.io

• I was appointed to lead the build of the new ESG platform holtara.io, which provides reporting solutions tailored for clients that participate in the private markets.

• I proposed following the strangler-fig pattern to incrementally replace the existing ESG-IQ Application with a new technology stack aligned with Apex group standards.

• The first version of holtara.io was launched a year later with a new React front-end and Cognito authentication served by the legacy PHP back-end with significant data model changes all hosted on a Kubernetes cluster.

• The next phase of the project was to replace the service layer with a new back-end built on C# .Net 8, deployed on Kubernetes and integrated with Azure Service Bus, Snowflake, and an external AI partner platform.

• This was deployed successfully in mid-2025 and enabled Apex to migrate their existing ESG clients from an external vendor platform and ESG-IQ onto holtara.io

• My current focus is on implementing AI capabilities within the holtara.io platform to improve developer productivity and also to safely deploy embedded reports developed by the non-technical product team using AI.

• In addition I have also begun configuring Azure AI Foundry to enable the deployment of internally developed AI capabilities within the holtara.io platform

• Apart from the ESG platform I have participated in the architecture review boards, critiquing proposals from other teams.

• Contributed to containerisation initiatives within the Apex loans lab team, providing solutions using similar principles to the ESG platform but with different tooling based on AWS and Github using github actions, EC2, S3, Cloudformation, Route53, Cloudfront, WAF, Lambda, and Cognito.

• holtara.io Team Size: 47; scaling in Production since 2024; Releases Weekly

MJ Hudson, Systems Architect

London, UK

Oct 2021 – May 2023

1 year 8 months

IQ Application Suite, Containerisation and Cloud-Native Development

• Responsible for the IQ Application Suite which was a platform for data gathering and reporting across multiple business lines servicing private markets clients, including asset management, due diligence, regulatory reporting, fiduciary management and ESG, built on a technology stack comprised of PHP, Oracle and Windows.

• Improved operational resilience, observability, and deployment consistency of the platform, by introducing containerisation and cloud-native development practices.

• I implemented git source control with CI/CD pipelines and automated build, test, and deployment workflows across multiple environments hosted on Kubernetes, while using Bicep for IAC components such as Storage Accounts, Key Vaults, Service Bus and private DNS. Overall this approach increased deployment confidence, improved delivery reliability and reduced operational risk, and positioned the platform for future development and expansion.

• IQ Suite Team Size: 9; Releases Monthly

Standard Bank / Infomet, Staff Engineer / Technical Lead

Johannesburg, ZA

Apr 2011 – Sept 2021

10 years 6 months

Pan-African Sub-Ledger Platform

• Led the design and delivery of financial sub-ledger processing for the trading platform of Standard Bank Africa Banking across 18 countries.

• This involved daily processing of posting files, reconciliation, and ledger substantiation across multiple asset classes including bonds, FX derivatives, loans, and money markets.

• Worked closely with business analysts and finance stakeholders to translate complex financial requirements into robust, auditable systems.

• I established the patterns and created tooling to facillitate the rollout of the platform across multiple countries, ensuring consistent delivery and operational practices.

• The tooling and approach that I had established for the trading platform was subsequently adopted for other workstreams including credit-card, asset-finance and loan syndication enabling the bank to achieve a consistent approach to financial processing across multiple business lines. By this time I had been appointed as the technical lead across all workstreams in the sub-ledger including core-banking.

• Developed reusable financial and technical components such as a database logging framework, which was adopted across multiple streams, reducing duplication and improving observability.

• Led incremental evolution of the platform over a decade, including database upgrades, infrastructure modernisation, and build/deploy automation. My approach of automating the database schema and data migrations using custom tooling eliminated problems with manual migrations and enabled implementations to move from unstable monthly releases to confident weekly releases.

• Improved delivery reliability through automated deployments, environment promotion, and source-control standardisation.

• Team Size: 35; 400 users; Database Size 17TB; Peak Daily Financial TX 37,000,000; 10+ Years in Production since 2011; Releases weekly

Standard Bank, Software Engineer / Technical Lead

Johannesburg, ZA

Jan 2010 – Mar 2011

1 year 2 months

CIB Treasury Calypso Trading System

• Served as technical lead for the Calypso trading platform within CIB Treasury, owning the technical design and implementation for onboarding new product types, including government and corporate bonds and floating-rate money market instruments.

• Acted as the primary technical authority on Calypso for treasury and capital markets workflows, supporting business analysts and front-office stakeholders in translating complex product requirements into robust system implementations.

• Represented Standard Bank CIB on industry-wide working committees with the Central Securities Depository, contributing to and influencing market-wide interface specifications that were subsequently adopted as the country standard.

• Led significant improvements to the development lifecycle for Calypso teams, migrating builds from Ant to Maven, introducing unit testing, and establishing a standardised build structure adopted across multiple teams.

• Improved technical and business documentation practices by introducing structured, shared documentation via internal wiki platforms, reducing knowledge silos and improving operational transparency.

• Remained hands-on throughout, contributing directly to code, build tooling, and integrations while providing technical leadership across the platform.

Rand Merchant Bank, Domain Architect - Integration

Johannesburg, ZA

Nov 2006 – Dec 2009

3 years 2 months

Lead for Integration Centre of Excellence

• Served as Domain Architect for integration across the RADA reporting and analytics project, owning end-to-end integration and orchestration between 19 upstream source systems and Oracle Financials.

• Led integration architecture for a bank-wide KYC programme, defining verification workflows, orchestration patterns, data lineage, and interfaces across multiple systems of record.

• Designed and implemented enterprise integration architecture using TIBCO integration suite and Informatica ETL, ensuring data consistency, traceability, and reliability across heterogeneous systems.

• Acted as Technical Architect for the Master Data Management platform, designing and delivering a JEE-based application deployed on JBoss to manage shared reference and master data.

• Served as Technical Lead for the Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) programme, evaluating commercial and open-source ESB technologies and shaping the bank’s integration strategy.

• Remained hands-on throughout, contributing to Java/JEE development, build tooling, automated testing, and integration components.

• Improved engineering discipline and delivery quality through XP practices, pair programming, automated builds, and shared documentation using Jira and Confluence.

• Developed internal tooling, including an open-source Jira plugin enabling LDAP-based single sign-on with Active Directory, improving developer productivity and platform usability.

STRATE Limited, IT Development Manager / Technical Architect

Johannesburg, ZA

Oct 2001 – Oct 2006

5 years 1 month

CSD & Securities Settlement System

• Designed systems supporting the settlement of equities, bonds, money markets and OTC instruments for the South African Central Securities Depository.

• Progressed from Front-End Team Lead on a mission-critical C++ settlement application to IT Development Manager, with responsibility across Java and COBOL/CICS/DB2 development teams.

• Held overall technical responsibility for systems supporting the settlement and reconciliation of equity, bond, money-market, and OTC transactions across national financial-market infrastructure.

• Designed systems where transactional correctness, fault tolerance, auditability, and regulatory compliance were mandatory operational requirements.

• Led the migration of the SAFE platform from IBM C++ to J2EE, designing the target architecture and delivering a production system deployed across JBoss and WebSphere on Windows and AIX.

• Owned architecture and delivery across a heterogeneous estate spanning Java/J2EE front-end systems and mainframe back-end services, with a strong focus on correctness, resilience, and regulatory compliance.

• Designed and delivered integration and messaging solutions supporting high-value financial transaction flows through SWIFT MT2xx and MT5xx, FIX, XML, and JMS-based workflows, including message routing, transformation, and tracking capabilities.

• Planned and implemented web-based reporting and data-sales platforms, defining application architecture, database design, and secure connectivity to DB2 on z/OS via MQ Series.

• Defined and enforced Java engineering standards, architectural patterns, and build practices across teams, improving consistency, maintainability, and delivery quality.

• Represented STRATE on the South African FIX Protocol working group, contributing to industry-wide interoperability standards.

• Managed recruitment, mentoring, and technical standards across a team of approximately 19 engineers, while remaining closely involved in architectural decisions and complex technical problem-solving.

UBS Warburg, Systems Analyst

London, UK

Feb 1998 – July 2001

3 years 6 months

Euro conversion, Y2K and new stock reconciliation system

• Delivered extensive enhancements to a legacy IDMS-based trading and reconciliation platform to support Euro currency adoption, meeting regulatory requirements and an immovable market deadline.

• Led technical upgrades across critical integration components, including CICS and Sybase gateways, to ensure full Year 2000 compliance for high-value financial processing systems.

• Designed and implemented global reconciliation capabilities ensuring consistency between trading, settlement, and custody records across distributed systems.

• Implemented reliable, high-volume messaging between mainframe and distributed components using MQ Series, supporting global reconciliation workflows.

• Designed and delivered a SWIFT message retrieval system using MQ Series clients with C++ and Delphi on Windows NT.

• Supported high-availability financial-processing environments where operational resilience and data accuracy were business-critical.

BACG / Armature, Analyst Programmer

Johannesburg, ZA & Salt Lake City, USA

Apr 1997 – Jan 1998

10 months

Retail Masterdata Management System

• Enhanced and maintained a COBOL/CICS/DB2 application supporting retail warehouse and distribution operations.

• Used TELON CASE tooling to generate COBOL programs for master data and transactional processing.

• Acted as technical advisor to an outsourced project and coordinated application upgrades to client sites.

• Participated in on-site system implementation with client teams in the United States.

Standard Bank, Programmer

Johannesburg, ZA

Feb 1995 – Mar 1997

2 years 1 month

Branch Banking System

• Developed and maintained a branch front-line banking system built on a COBOL/CICS/DB2 back-end with distributed DB2 databases deployed to branch environments.

• Contributed to the design and implementation of an early Internet Banking platform using COBOL, CICS DLI, and Sybase Gateway integration.

• Provided second-line, 24-hour operational support for mainframe batch processing, ensuring reliability of end-of-day and overnight financial workflows.

Interests & Technical Research

Agentic AI workflows and developer productivity tooling

Local AI model deployment and inference optimisation

Blockchain, distributed ledger architectures and digital asset infrastructure, I mined my first Bitcoin in 2016 and have been following the space ever since.

Skills

Financial Infrastructure: Ledgering, Sub-Ledgers, Reconciliation, Settlement Systems, Transaction Processing, Financial Controls, Auditability, Regulatory Systems, Capital Markets

Architecture & Platforms: Microservices, Event-Driven Architecture, Distributed Systems, Service-Oriented Architecture, Cloud-Native Development

Practices & Methodologies: Agile (SAFe, Scrum, Kanban), eXtreme Programming (XP), Test-Driven Development, Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery

Languages: C#, JavaScript/TypeScript, SQL, PL/SQL, PHP, Python, Java, Groovy, Powershell, Bash, HTML, C, C++, COBOL

JS Frameworks: React, Svelte-Kit, Vue, Vite

Testing: JUnit, xUnit, NUnit, Jest, Selenium, Postman, Playwright, Mockito, Cobertura, Cucumber

Source Control: Git, GitHub, Subversion, CVS

CI/CD: GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, Azure Pipelines

Databases: Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, MySQL/MariaDB, SQLite, Sybase, DB2, IDMS, Lotus Notes

Messaging & Integration: Azure Service Bus, RabbitMQ, Tibco EMS/BW, Websphere MQ, RESTful APIs, SOAP Web Services

Web Servers & SSL: nginx, Apache HTTP Server, IIS, certbot

Containers & Orchestration: Docker, Docker Compose, Podman, Kubernetes, Kustomize

Infrastructure: Terraform, Cloudformation, Bicep

Cloud Platforms: Microsoft Azure, AWS

Cloud Services: Azure (Private DNS; Container Registry; AKS; Vault; Storage Accounts; Service Bus), Github Container Registry, AWS (Cloudformation; Route 53; EC2; RDS; S3; Lambda; Cloudfront; WAF; Secrets Manager; Cognito)

Collaboration Tools: Azure DevOps, JIRA, Confluence