Chief Technology Officer, Meridian Trust Bank · Ex-Klarna · Core-banking migrations without downtime
Portland · Meridian Trust Bank · 911+ connections
I wrote my first banking code at nineteen, fixing overnight interest batch jobs for a Swedish savings bank. I have essentially been doing the same job at increasing scale ever since.
In October 2022 we replaced Meridian Trust's 1998-era core banking system. Eighteen months of planning, four months running both systems in parallel, one Sunday-night cutover. Customers logged in on Monday and noticed nothing. That is the highest compliment a bank's technology can receive, and the 340-page runbook sits on my shelf like a trophy.
The best technology in a bank is the kind you never think about. If you noticed it, I have failed.
Four years since the core cutover. A reporter asked me this week what the secret was. Running both systems in parallel for four months and reconciling every account every night was the secret. It was expensive and boring and it is why nobody noticed. Boring is the goal.
We rebuilt online banking last year. The design brief was one line: a customer should be able to find their balance, their last five transactions and a human's phone number within five seconds of logging in. Every feature that made that slower was cut. Our support call volume dropped 30%.
The phone number on the dashboard is the single most-praised thing in branch feedback. Thank you.
Nine years of mandatory 3 p.m. fika for the technology team. Cardamom buns on Fridays. Attendance is voluntary but monitored. It is the best engineering-culture decision I have made, and I include the migration.
Branch operations would like to be included in the monitoring.
Core systems, digital banking, payments, security. Led the 2022 core migration (zero customer downtime) and the 2024 online-banking rebuild.
Payments architecture for Pacific Northwest banks and credit unions, including Meridian Trust's 2015 payments project.
Early-stage payments infrastructure through hypergrowth; ran the settlement and reconciliation team.
Overnight interest posting and statement jobs. Where it started.
M.Sc. Computer Science, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, 2004
CISSP, 2015
The board heard 'parallel for four months' and asked about the cost. I asked about the alternative. We approved it in one meeting.
Boring is a risk control. Put that on a mug.