Volodymyr Prokopyuk, Vlad

Payments Architect, Solution Architect

Instant payments, cross-border payments

Languages

English fluent
Spanish fluent
Ukrainian mother tongue
Russian native

Summary

I'm a self-motivated solution architect, a blockchain enthusiast, and a technical leader with the business focus, the learning mindset, and 16 years of contrasted experience in the design and development of the modern payment systems, with a proven track record in the technical leadership of engineering teams. I always apply critical thinking and continuous innovation to system design and application development. I enjoy working remotely with efficient time and task management, applying the emotional intelligence to facilitate effective communication, boost the productive collaboration and the feeling of achievement for the whole team. I'm interested in the distributed system design, the blockchain technology, the development of smart contracts, the distributed databases and the data streaming, the cloud computing, the cybersecurity, the web3 technology, the algorithms and data structures

Key capabilities

Technical leadership and effective communication
Effective mediation between business and engineering
Technical mentoring and coaching of engineering teams
Blockchain design and development of smart contracts
Design and development of modern payment systems
Standards-compliant, cloud-native security solutions
DevSecOps design and development of IAM solutions
Self-motivation, learning mindset, continuous innovation
Efficient time management and focus on results

Personal profile discovery insights by Maxima, Sep 2022

Technologies

Ethereum

Smart contracts platform

Solidity

Smart contracts language

Foundry

Smart contracts development

Uniswap

Decentralized exchange

Go

Programming language

Node.js

JavaScript runtime

Bun

JavaScript runtime

PostgreSQL

Relational database

CockroachDB

Distributed database

Kafka

Distributed streaming

Redpanda

Distributed streaming

gRPC

Bi-directional communication

AWS

Cloud computing

Terraform

Infrastructure management

Kubernetes

Container orchestration

Docker

Containeraized applications

Achievements

Blockchain from scratch in Go with gRPC

Guided blockchain from scratch in Go https://github.com/volodymyrprokopyuk/go-blockchain
Designed, implemented, tested, and documented a complete blockchain from scratch in Go using gRPC as the inter-node communication protocol. The blockchain manages accounts using the Secp256k1 elliptic curve key pairs and the AES-GCM encryption with the Argon2 KDF. The blockchain verifies transactions and creates blocks using the ECDSA Secp256k1 digital signatures and the Keccak256 hash function. The blockchain employs the Merkle proof to prove the inclusion of transactions into blocks, and verify the integrity of transactions on the blockchain. The blockchain implements the concurrency safe peer discovery mechanism in the peer-to-peer blockchain network. The concurrency safe transaction relay and the block relay mechanisms ensure the resilient propagation of transactions through the peer-to-peer network, and the synchronization of the blockchain state on each node using the Go channel composition and multiplexing, and the gRPC server and client streaming. The blockchain state manages the lifecycle of transactions and blocks in the concurrency safe way using the Go mutexes and channels. The blockchain implements the Proof of Authority consensus. The concurrency safe blockchain node event streaming concurrently delivers blockchain domain events in real-time to subscribed clients using the Go concurrency primitives and the gRPC server streaming. The blockchain provides the CLI over the gRPC to have complete control of the blockchain from the command line. The 140-page guide fully documents the blockchain design and implementation. The guide explains the theoretical foundations, and provides the practical testing and usage examples, invaluable for effective learning of the blockchain concepts, and progressive building of the blockchain from scratch in Go

Federated IAM for instant payment processing

Situation: an instant payments product provides reliable and efficient connectors to different payment schemes along with a unified payment data store that is the single source of truth for all payment processing. Before the change: all access to the payment connectors and the payment data store was managed through manually provisioned generic accounts reused by client bank operators and bank systems
Task: design and implement a federated IAM solution that securely manages access of client bank operators and bank systems to applications and APIs of the instant payments product. The IAM solution should support federated identity management and provide fine-grained access control mechanisms with corresponding security monitoring and access audit functions for client bank administrators
Action: a standard-compliant, reliable, and scalable IAM solution delegates the initial authentication of principals to the bank federated identity provider, as well as supports the adaptive authentication with MFA by requesting additional authentication factors before granting access to sensitive payment information and critical operations. The IAM solution features dynamic, flexible, and fine-grained PBAC fully managed by client bank administrators
Result: the standard-compliant IAM solution provides secure and compliant access of client bank operators and bank systems to the instant payment product applications and APIs. The IAM solution directly contributes to faster time-to-value, reduced operational costs, and increased customer trust by seamless integration with the bank-managed federated identity provider, and dynamic and flexible access policies fully controlled by the client bank administrators

Unified payment data store

Situation: an instant payments product connects to multiple payment schemes e. g. SEPA, STEP1, STEP2, RT1, TIPS. Before the change: each payment scheme had its own scheme-specific payment processing view (operational dashboard). A payment operator had to consult multiple systems during a payment investigation or a manual payment repair
Task: provide a unified view on payment processing under different payment schemes, allow enrichment of standard payment messages with customer-specific data while being compliant with ISO 20022
Action: design and implement a generic relational data model that allows arbitrary typed connections between standard payment messages including non-standard customer-specific data payloads
Result: increased customer satisfaction with the unified view on payment processing across multiple payment schemes, the scalable system-wide transaction log, the single source of truth for payment operations, real-time payment monitoring, and payment analytics

Stable FX pricing and execution

Situation: a cross-border payment service provides very competitive real-time FX rates available to a big bank. However, FX rates are quite volatile and change frequently. Before the change: a real-time FX rate was provided for an initial quote, then an updated real-time FX rate was silently applied to the instructed payment which was totally unexpected to customers. This quickly transformed into a negative feedback and an increased abandonment rate
Task: offer stable FX pricing to customers for the duration (15 mins) of their payment journey from the initial quoting and payment funding through the beneficiary screening and risk assessment to the payment routing and payment execution. The company absorbed the FX loss or gain due to the volatility of FX pricing
Action: design and implement a stable FX pricing for 15 mins with an explicit notification of a customer about a new FX quote after 15 mins if a payment was not yet instructed
Result: increased customer satisfaction and higher usage of the payment service due to elimination of unexpected changes of FX pricing during a payment journey

Automated digital identity verification

Situation: a cross-border payment service provides payment services to a big number of customers in multiple countries (UK, Spain, Belgium). Before the change: a semi-manual process for customer onboarding with manual validation of every new customer. A customer onboarding was finished and the account activated only after a manual check that took 1-2 days. Periodic check of expired customer documents was not feasible for manual processing given a big number of customers
Task: design a seamless and fully automated customer onboarding, automatically collect and verify customer personal data, enough to support AML and fraud checks from the KYC perspective. Automatically build a customer riks profile and calculate a customer risk score. Ensure seamless periodic checks of expired customer documents to stay compliant with regulations
Action: design and implement integrations with country-specific providers of digital identity verification (capture of a national ID or a driver license, matching a selfie with the ID card, a liveness probe) to support a fully automated instant onboarding of low risk customer profiles
Result: increased a lead-to-customer conversion, increased customer satisfaction, decreased abandonment rate due to a frictionless fully automated instant customer onboarding through a digital identity verification, as well as periodic checks of expired customer documents customer personal data

Employment

Senior Payments Architect

Apr 2021 - current, permanent, fully remote

Worked as a Senior Payments Architect on the next generation instant payments framework IPF for Icon Solutions, the leading global provider of instant payments technology and mission-critical banking solutions for tier 1 global banks and payment service providers worldwide

Icon Solutions, London

World class payments and enterprise solutions for the global financial sector

Instant payments industry (FinTech)

Main responsibilities. Key projects and achievements

Led the design and successfully presented to the customer (tier 1 global bank headquartered in Zurich) the global security architecture for their next-generation instant payment platform operated in a hybrid cloud
Led the design and successfully presented to the customer (one of the biggest US banks) the mission-critical settlement and reconciliation platform for the PayPal digital wallet payouts
Successfully conducted the design of the generic, extensible, ISO 20022-compatible payment data store product that powers billions of instant payment transactions in several leading global banking institutions
Led the design and implementation of the platform-wide job scheduling and management service for the Icon's instant payments framework (IPF) that schedules, orchestrates and controls billions of instant payment transactions worldwide
Successfully architected the fully automated monitoring and benchmarking suite that measures and analyzes the performance of key business functions of the Icon's instant payments platform (IPF) with insightful monitoring and benchmarking data analysis and visualization
Led the design and implementation of zero downtime rolling upgrades for the Icon's instant payments framework (IPF) with strong data consistency and system resilience guarantees in handling in-flight transactions

Skills and competencies

Security design of instant payments platforms
Authentication and identity management
Authorization and permission management
Application security in cloud environments
Design of settlement and reconciliation systems
Data modeling of instant payments data stores
Relational and document-oriented data modeling
Asynchronous event-based payment data integration
Design of business-oriented microservices architectures
Distributed job scheduling, management and control
Application monitoring and benchmarking
Statistical data analysis and visualization
Time series data analysis and visualization

Technologies

DDD EDA CEP FRP ISO 20022 MFA OAuth2 OpenID Connect OpenSSL Azure Kubernetes Docker Java PostgreSQL Kafka Prometheus Grafana TimescaleDB Svelte Plotly.js

Cross-border Payments Platform Architect

Nov 2019 - Mar 2021 (1 year, 4 months), permanent

Worked as a Cross-border Payments Platform Architect on the next generation cross-border payments and foreign exchange platform PagoFX for Santander, the multinational commercial bank and financial services company

PagoFX by Santander, Madrid

A new way to send money abroad

Cross-border payments industry (FinTech)

Main responsibilities. Key projects and achievements

Designed the cloud-native microservices architecture of the cross-border payments and foreign exchange platform
Architected the key platform components to support the credit card and bank account payment funding, AML and fraud checking, cross-border payments routing and execution, FX pricing and execution, digital wallet management, accounting ledger and reconciliation processing
Designed the customer onboarding (KYC) and identity management platform including the digital identity verification, customer, beneficiary and payment screening (AML), customer profile and payment risk assessment
Designed the effective security architecture for the cross-border payments and foreign exchange platform compliant with the GDPR, PSD2 and EBA guidelines
Led the design of the bidirectional, real-time integration of the cross-border payments platform with the Salesforce Servicing Cloud (CRM and case management) and the Salesforce Marketing Cloud (lead generation and marketing communication)

Skills and competencies

Design of cloud-native microservices architectures
Design of cross-border payment systems
Design of foreign exchange integrations
KYC, digital identity management and verification
AML, fraud and payment risk assessment
Design of standard-compliant security architectures
Design of integrations with Salesforce cloud services

Technologies

DDD KYC AML GDPR Salesforce CRM MFA OAuth2 OpenID Connect GCP Kubernetes Docker Node.js TypeScript JavaScript PostgreSQL

Team Lead, Security Architect

Aug 2018 - Oct 2019 (1 year, 3 months), permanent

Worked as a Team Lead and a Security Architect on the content protection anti-piracy response platform Armada for NAGRA, the global leader in digital security, conditional access, and convergent media solutions

Nagravision Kudelski Group, Madrid

Connecting people to the content they love

Content protection industry

Main responsibilities. Key projects and achievements

Led the brainstorming sessions on the definition of product features for the content protection anti-piracy response platform with program managers and business representatives
Successfully conducted the technical leadership on the design and implementation of the anti-piracy response platform distributed, scalable serverless system deployed to AWS
Became the technical coach and organized 20+ technical knowledge transfer sessions for the engineering and service delivery teams
Led the organization of strategical and tactical work planning, effort estimations, dependency management and work prioritization
Led the technical coordination of the international, cross-functional and multi-cultural engineering team of 12-15 members distributed across Spain, Switzerland and India
Built the highly cohesive, cross-functional and empowered team of engineers that enjoy advanced agile and lean methodologies and deliver quality products on time. Made people feel comfortable about what they do, actively participate in the process and have the feeling of achievement
Gracefully conducted 30+ technical recruiting interviews and succesfully recruited 5 senior software architects and engineers

Skills and competencies

Technical leadership and effective business communication
Strategical work planning and prioritization
Analytical thinking and problem solving
Focus on results and attention to details
Knowledge sharing and clear technical communication
Cross-functional team building and soft skills
Technical interviewing and recruitment
Design of scalable, serverless solutions on AWS
Relational data modeling
Software lifecycle management

Technologies

Scrum/Kanban/Lean AWS VPC IAM ELB API Gateway AWS Lambda REST OAuth2 SQS RDS S3 CloudWatch CloudFormation Python MySQL

Solution Architect

Feb 2018 - Jul 2018 (6 months), permanent

Worked as a Solution Architect for the leading Spanish IT consultancy

atSistemas, Madrid

We hope to create a leading company in digital transformation by joining people, technology and business

IT consultancy

Solution Architect

Feb 2018 - Jul 2018 (6 months), contractor

Worked as a Solution Architect on the full digital transformation of the credit card business core system for Diners Club Spain, the charge and credit card international company

Diners Club Spain, Madrid

Experience and innovation in credit cards

Credit cards industry

Main responsibilities. Key projects and achievements

Worked side-by-side with the client to elaborate the detailed business requirements, define the well-architected technical solution and select the most appropriate technological stack
Completely redesigned the credit card business core system from the monolithic legacy mainframe application to the cloud-ready, modular and scalable system using modern technological stack
Let the development and testing of the online credit card transaction authorization, core credit card batch processing and transaction inquiry and investigation operational portal with the microservices backed
Successfully designed the credit card business core system to be compliant with the PCI DSS and the GDPR
Successfully conducted the technical leadership of a remote engineering team of 10-12 members to rebuild from scratch the cloud-ready credit card business core system
Gracefully conducted 10+ technical recruiting interviews and successfully recruited 3 senior developers

Skills and competencies

Technical leadership and effective communication
Design of credit card business core systems
Design of cloud-ready microservices architectures
Security and compliance with PCI DSS and GDPR
Technical interviewing and recruitment

Technologies

PCI DSS GDPR Java Kotlin Spring MS SQL Server OAuth2 Keycloak

Solution Architect

Nov 2016 - Jan 2018 (1 year, 3 months), permanent

Worked as a Solution Architect for the leading international IT consultancy

TATA Consultancy Services, Madrid

Global leader in IT services, digital and business solutions

IT consultancy

Technical Lead

Nov 2016 - Jan 2018 (1 year, 3 months), contractor

Worked as a Technical Lead on the next generation Salesforce CRM intelligent integration for Iberia, the flag carrier airline of Spain

Iberia, Madrid

Leading airline between Europe and Latin America

Airline and travel industry

Main responsibilities. Key projects and achievements

Successfully conducted the translation of business requirements to the detailed technical solution design acting as the effective bridge between the business stakeholders and the engineering team
Successfully led and coordinated the cross-functional and multi-cultural engineering team distributed between Spain and India
Designed the intelligent integration layer between the Iberia core business systems and the Salesforce CRM cloud services as a set of 30+ reliable and secure microservices deployed to AWS

Skills and competencies

Effective mediation between business and engineering
Technical leadership of distributed engineering teams
Design of in-cloud integration microservices
Security of integration services

Technologies

AWS EC2 ELB REST Java Spring OAuth2 Keycloak ELK

Frontend Architect

Feb 2016 - Oct 2016 (9 months), permanent

Worked as a Frontend Architect for the leading Spanish IT consultancy

Kairos Digital Solutions, Madrid

We transform organizations supported by agile principles

IT consultancy

Frontend Quality Architect

Feb 2016 - Oct 2016 (9 months), contractor

Worked as a Frontend Quality Architect on the next generation global banking mobile application for BBVA, the international Spanish banking group

BBVA, Madrid

The best digital bank of the 21^st century

Mobile banking industry

Main responsibilities. Key projects and achievements

Actively participated and contributed to the design of the quality enabling software lifecycle and testing strategies for the global banking mobile application
Implemented the advanced testing tool for automated visual detection of regression errors in the application UI screenshots between sebsequent builds of global banking mobile application

Skills and competencies

Software lifecycle management
Design of testing strategies for mobile banking applications

Technologies

Polymer HTML CSS JavaScript Node.js TDD BDD CI/CD

Senior Software Engineer

Mar 2009 - Jan 2016 (6 years, 11 months), permanent

Worked as a Senior Software Engineer on global flight reservation services and travel agency back office business applications for Amadeus, the major international IT provider for the global travel and tourism industry

Amadeus IT Group, Madrid

World leading IT provider for the global travel and tourism industry

Travel and tourism industry

Main responsibilities. Key projects and achievements

Designed and developed the flight and hotel reservation and payment solution that integrates the Amadeus Selling Platform with the American Express payment provider
Designed and developed the massive flight itinerary PDF generation and notification system for the leading international travel agency
Designed and developed the flight and fare change monitoring and notification system on top of the Amadeus Global Distribution System (GDS)
Designed and developed 5+ flight booking and payment web applications for travel agency back office on top of the Amadeus Selling platform
Developed 5+ B2B integrations with the Amadeus Web Services
Designed and developed the Amadeus GDS mainframe integration library that exposes airline content as a cohesive set of microservices with the REST API