Akif Naveed

About

I’m a banking data and integration engineer based in Almere, the Netherlands, with 8+ years of delivery experience across Banking, Telco, Defense and Retail sectors.

Since 2020 I’ve been embedded inside a Tier-1 European bank — across the Wealth Management and International Core Banking grid — designing Azure cloud-native data and reporting platforms that underpin regulatory submissions to the European Central Bank (ECB) and CESOP, payments operations, and executive decision-making.

What I currently do

I lead the design and build of the Payments Domain Data Store (DDS) on Azure Databricks: driving requirements engineering with business and product stakeholders, authoring the logical and physical data models in erwin Data Modeler, and delivering reporting through self-service Power BI and on-demand high-value data products on top of the model. Alongside that, I own the engineering side of regulatory submissions to the ECB and CESOP, embedding controls aligned to non-functional requirements for availability, traceability and audit.

I also act as the single point of contact (SPOC) for the re-platforming program migrating on-premise banking workloads across three countries onto Azure, while enforcing enterprise data governance covering data quality, MDM, data architecture, and data security.

The longer arc

Before banking, I worked as a pre-sales and solutions consultant at HyperNym in Islamabad, leading enterprise engagements in telco, defense and public-sector. That included building POLE (Person–Object–Location–Event) graph investigations on Neo4j for the Islamabad Police, and a Twitter-analysis POC for Dubai Police under the Dubai Future Accelerators Program (Cohort 5). I started my career at Info-Matrix delivering BI implementations on OBIEE and QlikView for clients across Asia and Europe.

That consulting orientation — discovering requirements with stakeholders, translating business strategy into delivery roadmaps, and embedding governance early — is something I’ve carried into senior engineering.

Generative AI

In parallel I’ve built deep, hands-on expertise in designing, implementing and operating GenAI use cases end-to-end. I architected and shipped, single-handedly, a production multi-tenant e-commerce automation SaaS (HUB) that embeds LLM-driven customer-engagement workflows, diffusion-model synthetic product photography, and AI-assisted CRM, SEO and content automation. That experience of productionising GenAI inside live business workflows informs how I think about bringing AI into enterprise banking architecture.

Stack

Education & certifications

MSc Data Science from The University of Sheffield; BSc Computer Science from NUCES (FAST), Islamabad. Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Engineer Associate (DP-203), Power BI Data Analyst Associate (DA-100), Azure Data Fundamentals (DP-900), Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900). ITIL v4 Foundation.

Open to

Senior banking technology engineering and consulting roles across EMEA and the GCC — Wealth Management, Core Banking, payments, integration, regulatory delivery, and the bridge between data engineering and AI. Currently exploring opportunities in Doha, Riyadh and the wider GCC market.

Contact