API integration · Security · Secrets management
I build secure integrations between middleware, core banking systems and the applications around them — and the secrets management that keeps them honest.
5+ years across ESB and API management for BFSI: IBM DataPower, App Connect and API Connect, with Apigee, WSO2, Akamai API security and HashiCorp Vault. Solution design, architecture, security and performance — plus the presales work that gets a platform approved.
PRE presales & sizing · CON consulting & strategy
ENG engineering & implementation · MIG upgrade & migration
hands-onworking knowledge
What I do
Middleware moves the data. API gateways expose it. Secrets management decides who gets to ask. I work across all three, which is usually where the interesting failures live.
Integration & ESB
Connecting core banking systems, databases and external applications through IBM integration platforms — designed for throughput first, then for the audit that follows.
API management & security
Full API lifecycle across more than one vendor's platform, with the security layer treated as part of the design rather than something bolted on at UAT.
Secrets management & presales
Enterprise secrets management from architecture through rollout — and the solution design, sizing and licensing work that gets it signed off in the first place.
Services
Most engagements start at the left and move right. I can pick up at any point — including the ones where someone else built it and it now needs to move.
01 — Presales, sizing & sales
Requirement analysis, RFP and tender responses, pre-bid clarifications, vendor-neutral platform comparisons, and demos and proofs of concept that answer the question actually being asked. On the commercial side: edition and licence selection, client-count and capacity sizing, and multi-year bills of quantity that hold up when procurement re-checks them.
02 — Consulting & strategy
Target architecture for integration and API estates, solution design documents, and reference topologies across data centre and DR. Includes mapping platform controls to the regulation the customer is actually audited against, integration standards and API governance models, and honest advice on where a product does not fit the requirement.
03 — Engineering & implementation
Installation and hardening across DataPower, App Connect, API Connect and Vault — highly available topologies, gateway and message flow build, API lifecycle and consumer models, certificate and credential automation, and integration with SIEM and monitoring. Performance tuning where it matters, and runbooks so the operations team is not dependent on me afterwards.
04 — Upgrade & migration
Version upgrades across the IBM integration stack, migrations onto containerised Cloud Pak for Integration on OpenShift, and moves between API platforms. The work is mostly in the planning: dependency and compatibility assessment, cutover and rollback runbooks, parallel-run windows, and preserving existing consumer credentials so downstream applications never notice.
Credentials & stack
Tools I work in
Speaking & writing
A webinar for a BFSI audience on retiring static credentials — API key rotation at scale, securing core banking batch scripts, and automating certificates, drawn from live deployments.
Written material connecting RBI and SEBI expectations to concrete platform controls: privileged access, credential rotation and encryption key management, with the circular references intact.
Reusable design assets for banking secrets platforms — use case workbooks with sizing parameters, HA and DR topology diagrams, and sequence diagrams teams can take into their own reviews.
Get in touch
Tell me what you are building and what is in the way. If it is a fit I will say so, and if it is not I will tell you that too.