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Interview with Premanand Chandrasekaran, Barclaycard‘s Vice President:

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?

I started my career in India in 1997, working as a software engineer with CMC – (a Tata Enterprise). From there, I moved to Citibank for a year. In 2002, I started at ThoughtWorks and served in a variety of deep technology-facing roles — developer, technical lead, architect, consultant, and technical principal. The global nature of ThoughtWorks’ business meant interacting with a varied set of clients in multiple geographies in diverse domains. Being in the midst of some of the luminaries of the agile world, like Martin Fowler and Jim Highsmith, promoted a strong culture of software excellence and rapid iteration.

I began work at Barclaycard close to three years ago, first as a consultant and then as a full-time colleague, helping with the conception, architecture and implementation of our next generation platform, aimed to accelerate our ambitious growth plans. My experience working in deep technical roles while adopting iterative delivery methods coupled with working on large distributed programs allowed me to gain valuable insights on how to succeed with challenging software programs.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

In today’s fintech environment, the ability to very rapidly iterate over business ideas in production while continuing to serve existing customers reliably is paramount. Enablers such as the cloud and a plethora of high quality online remote collaboration tools have meant that rapid innovation at scale is no longer just for large corporations. At Barclaycard, our singular focus is on automation of every aspect of software delivery — including configuration changes, new features, bug fixes and experiments alike. This enables software teams to move at the speed of light, in a sustainable way.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

I’m currently creating the backbone for our next generation set of services and applications. Employing techniques such as domain-driven design (DDD) and architectural patterns such as event-driven architecture (EDA) and command query responsibility segregation (CQRS) allows us to build a highly cohesive, yet loosely coupled set of services. We went live with the second phase of the platform late last year. Now we’re working on applying the same solution at a global level. These are indeed very exciting times.

FinDEVr New York 2017 is partnered with American Banker, BayPay Forum, BiometricUpdate.com, Breaking Banks, Byte Academy, Canadian Trade Commissioner Service, Celent, CIOReview, Cointelegraph, Colloquy, Distributed, Economic Journal, Empire Startups, Femtech Leaders, Finmaps, Fintech Finance, Harrington Starr, Level39, Mercator Advisory Group, The Paypers, SecuritySolutionsWatch.com, Swiss Finance + Technology Association, and Women Who Code.