James Saunders Email & Phone Number

Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

RelyComply is an end-to-end Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Platform, managing detection, risk management and automation of your AML compliance requirements. AML is a critical part of fighting organised and transnational-organised crime. Our platform fulfills all the AML requirements for customers as big as international banks to small disruptive fintechs. It is a modern cloud-first and automation-first platform that dramatically drops the costs of compliance, and speeds up your customer acquisition.

Cape Town Area, South Africa

BusinessOptics is a decision support and automation system that enables you to visually create and explore powerful and accurate business models to enable you to make better decisions, and solve harder problems. Your models can directly power the business logic of any technology solutions through integration via web-services to save you significant time and money on development and maintenance. The system seamlessly integrates both the embedded knowledge of human experts as well as the power of machine learning and statistical inference.We service various sectors but focus primarily on the financial services sector, retail, and broader customer analytics. Our clients include some of South Africa's largest banks and insurers.

Orfeo is the research arm for ThoughtExpress, a complex knowledge management system primarily aimed at the financial industry. I was primarily responsible for developing the "Semantic Human Interface", a dynamically generated graph based interface to system. This involved developing a novel graph layout routine as well as dealing with many human interface aspects. Further I was responsible for documenting a custom in house programming language as well as creating an automatic API generation system. I aided in testing and online debugging as well as generally helping to upgrade/improve the development infrastructure and processes. I worked with a varied team of mathematicians, engineers, programmers and actuaries.

Ndibano-Intelligence in Systems (Pty) Ltd is a small research and development firm based in Cape town . Ndibano specialised in Bayesian reasoning systems and mobile auditing. In my time there I was deeply involved in the design and implementation of new systems, from inception to the final testing. Unfortunately in early 2010 the company hit major financial difficulties, prompting me to leave. I primarily worked on 2 projects: *A predictive behavioural analytics system for video surveillance. The work was done with a mixture of c/c++, Python and some Erlang (in early development). OpenCV was used for the base graphics libraries. The system was not developed to its full capacity as a result of various business difficulties. However, it implemented a novel tracking algorithm - a light-weight self-documenting computer-vision framework integrated into a Bayesian reasoning system. *A mobile auditing system for large housing and government projects. This involved writing mobile clients (Windows mobile running on Trimbles) which field workers could use to audit projects (according to flexible criteria). These results were then uploaded (in a lazy low bandwidth fashion) to central servers where data analytics would be performed on them. The project was written with c# for the mobile clients and Python using the Django framework for the web servers.

I did a variety of small computer related jobs for the Raqtan Group, who I had worked with previously. Among the tasks was facilitating negotiations between Raqtan and a Houston, Texas based IT services company, which required me to spend some time in Houston.

In 2007, myself and a business partner started a software development company, Valency Solutions. The company contracted out to Ahmed Raqtan Industrial Services (ARIS), now called Raqtan Group, a specialized control, instrumentation, electrical and process engineering company based in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We developed an engineering design tool to aid engineers in designing control systems using Foundation Fieldbus networks. The tool, known as TuFF, was developed to automate the design of control systems in large industrial facilities. It allows engineers to set high-level design rules which it then uses to design a fully fledged control system. Once the design is complete it provides an intuitive and visual interface for the management and fine tuned design of the control network. I was one of the lead software engineers and was responsible for the software engineering of the tool as well as the development of the complex core programming and algorithms. I worked extensively with experienced control system engineers in the designing of the algorithms and ran many design sessions with all stakeholders to design the user interface. As well as running the technical side I was also involved in running the business operations and was responsible for the management of a team of up to 15 junior programmers and testers. We worked both in Cape Town and in Saudi Arabia, with partners in Houston, Texas. The tool was designed within budget and on time. It is currently being phased into use in Saudi Arabia.

I Tutored both 1st and 2nd Year Computer Science and 1st year Maths Hotseat.

Bsc (Hons), Mathematics Of Computer Science

I obtained an Honours degree in “Mathematics of Computer Science” from the University of Cape Town. The degree was a specially tailored.

Bsc, Pure Mathematics, Computer Science

Activities and Societies: Township debaters league, Webmaster for various charity organizations, Ubunye TDL, Inkanyezi, Played in Res club.