Head of IT, Outsourcing Officer, Senior Project/Program Manager, IT Compliance Manager,

Project: Sanctions and Embargoes Transformation (SET) Program (Bank’s strategic global program to enhance their anti-financial crime landscape in response to serious US (OFAC) regulatory findings)

Role: Interim Manager at the Change Management workstream of the global Anti-Financial Crime (AFC) business unit, as part of the SET Program.
Tasks:
- Created and managed the lifecycle of 11 Change Requests (CRs) to the Transaction Filtering Case Management system (a private cloud application serving the bank in 50+ countries to review, decide and report on transactions which were marked as suspicious (“hit”) in the First Line of Defense, out of ~750 million transactions/year), from initial requirement gathering phase till successful roll-out to production. The CRs had to be prepared by considering the open audit findings, open production incidents, the globally scattered historic and new business demands and the physical limitations of the application.
- Alongside overall coordination duties, acted as Lead Business Analyst to collaborate with the business units from all global regions, the central IT organization and the software vendor’s onsite and offshore teams, for capturing and aligning the requirements that form the CRs. The CRs have been on a wide range of topics including enabling the global consistency of decision-making process (despite deviating local regulations), major improvements to the management information reporting including improved field level mappings of SWIFT and SEPA transactions, user rights enhancements and other functional and non-functional improvements on usability and system performance.
- Actively supported the bank internal Integration, User Acceptance and Performance Tests and the corresponding productive Incident Management and Release Management processes of the Transaction Filtering Case Management system.
- Formed a governance structure and prioritized the backlog of several hundred active and inactive CRs, interacting with global business units.
- Supported the transition of the SET IT organization from traditional project management to agile, utilizing Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). In this context acted as Epic Owner for numerous topics, representing AFC.

Significant achievements:
- Generated a 7-digit Euro cost saving for the bank due to the consolidation, refinement and elimination of numerous active CRs to the software vendor.
- Successfully addressed the relevant US regulatory audit findings.

Project: European Central Bank (ECB) Contract Remediation (Bank’s third-party risk management initiative, which was set up to handle the corresponding ECB audit findings as a cross departmental project between the Global Procurement and the Chief Information Security Office (new name: Information Risk and Resilience Management). Aim was to improve the vendor compliance to bank’s latest IT security framework on a global scale)

Interim Manager
Role: Interim Manager in the ECB Contract Remediation, which was a third-party risk management project set up between the Global Procurement and Chief Information Security Office (CISO) business units. Project’s goal was to remediate 1000 global, high risk vendor contracts of the bank to adapt to its newest IT security control framework based on ISO 27001, due to a European Central Bank regulation.
Tasks:
- Designed and participated in the development and execution of a new workflow system to document, analyze, classify and remediate the vendor contracts, which has interfaces to the existing contract and risk management systems of the bank.
- Established governance and cooperation rules with internal legal counsels from involved countries and external law firms.
- Prepared standard communication templates for all stakeholders.
- Directed the remediation effort for around 600 contracts (including all contracts that belong to “Top 16 Vendors” (based on contract volume and strategic importance) and “High Risk” categories, in addition, around half of the “Medium Risk” category contracts). Specifically, this meant to align the relevant business and procurement contacts for each contract, single-handedly drafting the contract changes and getting the appropriate legal approvals, initiating the change on the vendor side and coordinating the rest negotiations till the contract change gets executed and/or routed to bank internal risk-acceptance of the parts that could not be agreed upon.
- Supported the resolution of conflicts/gaps between the IT security control frameworks of the vendors’ and the bank.
- Established a feedback-channel and continually fed it to correct wrong/missing data and contract documents at the golden sources of the bank.

Significant achievements:
- On time, according to planned scope and under-budget (mainly due to the reduced cost for external law firms and translation agencies, as most of their planned work could be insourced) completion of the project, despite the complexity of geographical spread and significant number of stakeholders with different interests.

Head of IT
Role: Head of IT Department and a direct report to the bank’s CEO.
Direct reports: 5
Tasks:
- Management of the IT department and 25 IT vendors (of which 10 being critical).
- Acting as a single point of contact for all internal and external IT auditors (German and Turkish banking regulatory bodies, Akbank T.A.Ş. and Akbank AG internal audit departments) and directing the follow-up activities.
- Maintenance of a small onsite data center and local desktop infrastructure.
- Identity and Access Management as well as Service Management for all banking applications and document management systems.
- Overall architecture, IT and data security governance of the whole landscape, which involves cloud services used by the bank and the headquarter in Turkey.
- Sparring partner to the board and other departments in all operational IT matters and side business projects (EMIR, FATCA, etc.).
- IT procurement and the related contract management activities.
- Business continuity management including the management of distant emergency workspaces and execution of continuity tests.
- Project portfolio management.
- End-user support for ~35 employees.

Significant achievements:
- Stabilized the IT Organization (regarding the team, major systems and the main vendors) as a continuation of the post-merger activities of the bank (Akbank Netherlands had merged into Akbank AG in mid-2012).
- Directed the make-or-buy analysis for the digitalization of the credit department's complete workflow; created the solution architecture design and initiated the in-house implementation project.
- Initiated and directed the SEPA Implementation project till successful completion. Major tasks were software/vendor selection and the testing of the customized solution at bank’s premises.
- Directed a lengthy vendor selection process for the new online/mobile banking platform implementation of the bank.
- Conducted the Data Leakage Prevention (DLP) system selection.
- Selected a new vendor for the network vulnerability management and coordinated the implementation.
- Did major improvements to the operational processes and corresponding documentation for business continuity, data center, desktop infrastructure, core banking platform and related management information systems.
- Enhanced the existing Anti-Money Laundering systems (expanding the suspicious activity monitoring coverage, introducing a new name list vendor, implementation of a new roles/rights concept).
- Coordinated the Windows XP to 7/8 upgrade for business users.

Outsourcing Officer
In charge of selection, control (costs, SLAs) and relationship management for all (IT and non-IT) vendors of the bank.