My role in payzone is to provide guidance for the IT team when delivering products to the payzone business and our clients.I am involved right through the delivery process. It begins with the initial technical meetings with prospective clients and partners, discussing the possibilities that the payzone platform could offer and the impact on both customers and merchants.After that I work on the solution design taking into account the requirements of the client, any partners, our merchants and customers and any regulatory needs such as card scheme security (PCI DSS) data protection and our internal policies on security and availability.To avoid the perils of ivory tower architecture, I work closely with the development and QA team to ensure the design is deliverable and to incorporate any improvements suggested by them. I also communicate regularly with our IT operations team to improve the performance, availability and supportability of the solution once it has gone into production.In addition to that, my role includes an oversight of the technology stack. This has included moving from a closed, proprietary design to open web services available across a selection of channels including web sites, IVRs, mobile apps and SMS. Other changes have been moving from synchronous communication to queue based designs, implementing distributed caching and starting the move to a CI/CD process.

My responsibilities included adding new features to the SmartCity suite of software and fixing by bugs that our clients found. I was also involved in two great projects* migrating the software from VB6 and COM to C#.Net 2.0* learning all about the embedded Java platform so that I could replicate a cryptographic chip used as a SAM in our retail POS estate.