API integration · Security · Secrets management
I build the connections between middleware, core banking systems and the applications around them — and the secrets management that keeps them controlled.
5+ years across ESB and API management for BFSI. Senior Solution Specialist at Pronteff IT Solutions, Hyderabad.
Expertise
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
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, 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, 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 operations 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
Certifications
Tools I work in
Speaking & writing
Delivered Banking Beyond Passwords, a webinar for a BFSI audience on retiring static credentials — API key rotation at scale, securing core banking batch scripts and automating certificates. Ongoing technical notes at hemanthch.com/writing.
Writing
Aspera
Notes from installing High-Speed Transfer Server in a locked-down bank network, and the five things that cost the most time.
Vault
A Vault DR cluster that reported healthy but had not replicated for days. The cause was heartbeat address advertisement across NAT.