Ginto Mathew

Member of the technology leadership team, reporting to the CTO, with end-to-end accountability for service management at the challenger SME bank and the Banking-as-a-Service proposition incubated by NatWest Group plc.

• Built and scaled a lean, highly efficient service management function and a Corporate IT services team, supporting rapid growth from zero to 150,000 customers within two years of launch, while staff scaled from 40 to 650+.

• Directed a world-class incident management team, delivering 24/7 on-call coverage and achieving industry-leading incident response times (<5 minutes) and 99.94% availability for critical services.

• Pioneered business continuity and IT resiliency enhancements, conducting zero-downtime disaster recovery tests in production environments that exceeded both regulatory requirements and industry benchmarks.

• Led the adoption of a comprehensive observability framework by engineering squads. Automated monitoring and alerting systems  driving significant improvements in uptime and performance.

• Engaged with C-level executives, delivering key technology operational metrics on service availability, performance, and customer impact.

• Managed critical incident reporting for regulatory bodies and schemes including the PRA, ICO, Pay.UK, and Open Banking, ensuring compliance with stringent standards.

• Directed the performance management of suppliers and partners, driving service improvements through targeted performance enhancement programs.

• Led cost optimization and value improvement programs, including supplier/tooling switching, consolidations, and contract negotiations, achieving a 30% reduction in cost per staff member.

• Strengthened governance controls as part of the first line of defence, ensuring ownership of critical controls and maintaining a robust risk and compliance framework.

• Established processes and built teams for incident/crisis management, IT resiliency (disaster recovery), and supplier management, ensuring compliance with stringent regulatory controls and attestation requirements.

• Designed and implemented a cost-effective, cutting-edge mission control centre, utilizing open-source observability tooling and alerting infrastructure to enhance monitoring and responsiveness.

• Played a pivotal role in integrating payment schemes including Pay.UK, Open Banking, and Mastercard for banking client ,with a focus on governance controls, resiliency management, process testing, and external audits and attestations.

• Managed Business Intelligence (BI) and MI reporting, delivering actionable insights to stakeholders, including C-level executives.

• Provided consultancy services and successfully managed programs/projects for retail and e-commerce clients across Europe and North America, with a focus on IT infrastructure.

• Delivered measurable results, including the design, build, and transition of 53 brand websites for a major global retailer, and led multi-million-pound platform upgrades and hosting migrations.

• Implemented mission-critical e-commerce projects, enhanced infrastructure capacity, and ensured PCI-DSS compliance.

• Spearheaded migrations to cloud-based platforms (AWS) and conducted disaster recovery tests with zero downtime for two of UK's biggest grocery/retail chains.

• Consistently delivered projects on time and within budget while optimizing operations for scalability and efficiency.

• Delivered several Build-the-Bank projects such as secure web-channel implementation, third-party web service integrations, SWIFT payment gateway and HSM implementations, BoE enquiry link (RTGS), BACS, Faster Payment, and card payment/settlement implementations and testing.

• Played a pivotal role in coordinating operational acceptance testing projects for the online banking platform, involving multi-disciplinary teams such as Operations, Finance, Application Management Services, QA & Development.

• Delivered  IT service continuity initiatives such as High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR)Ensured effective risk management and control of operational processes, application software and infrastructure changes.

• Managed the applications Management Services (AMS) for the bank’s IT systems, including the development of operational procedures and key performance indicators (KPIs).

• Led complex infrastructure projects such as data centre refreshes and migrations.

• Managed 3rd party supplier performance Improvements : Drove cost savings and efficiency improvements via offshoring and near-shoring IT operations.

Managed two datacenters for Ivobank, an internet bank operating in 12 European countries and later acquired by Virgin Money as a flagship payments platform.

• Oversaw a diverse IT infrastructure, including VMware virtualization, RAID, SAN storage, WebSphere clusters on AIX, .NET middleware, ICBS core banking systems, and SQL/Oracle databases on Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

• Designed and implemented Business Continuity (BCP) and Disaster Recovery (DR) strategies in collaboration with Business and Technical Architects.

• Maintained production systems’ availability and performance, consistently meeting or exceeding service level agreements (SLAs).

• Established and led a 24/7 multi-functional service delivery team, partnering with offshore providers and managing an incident management rota.

• Resolved incidents, problems, and service issues efficiently by coordinating multi-disciplinary teams in a matrix structure.

• Ensured adherence to IT service management processes, IT security policies, and risk and governance standards.

• Managed supplier relationships to optimize service delivery.

• Co-managed IT security incidents for the e-banking platform.

Growing from hand-on technical roles (network engineering) to managerial/ consulting roles such as IT
Operations Management, Service Management, Project Management, Head of Operations & Service Management Consultant.