Lothar Buchholz

Background

About Lothar Buchholz

Servant leader and people person, managing various teams and projects for more than 8 years. I like to empower my co-workers to take new challenges and share experience with their team. Widely experienced Java developer with a good balance for practical and business-oriented solutions. Coming from university I started as a Java developer at a IT service organisation called taskarena (later IMS Software), and quickly gained experience in a couple of client projects. Early on I also got to lead the development of an inhouse solution for field sales coordination, time recording, skill and customer management. In my next job at Hype I also plunged into key accounting and direct customer contact, but realized this was not the right thing for me. When I moved to Vienna to live together with my girlfriend, I joined Smartstream and got to work on a major software for the SWIFT consortium, combining a Cobol/C core application with a very modern, modular OSGi application and RAP/RCP frontend. After the project got cancelled, I was assigned the lead for the static data team and later on the persistence module to head a complete rewrite. After the Smartstream development team got closed and a two stopovers later, I'm now working for ING Austria. I was especially interested in INGs agile way of working: a Scrum-based, Spotify-inspired, cross-functional workflow and organisation. In the first one and a half years I rapidly learned about all the various systems, the overall architecture, banking regulations and the agile culture. Since 2018 I'm also disciplinary lead of 10 employees, working in loans, online banking, digital sales, regulatory and internal IT. My core responsibilities are defining and ensuring high quality standards for our bi-weekly, no-downtime banking deployments, recruiting and staffing Java developers for our ten feature squads, maintain high productivity and optimize internal processes, drive people development and encouraging knowledge transfer. In my squads, I was also leading the development of the credit scoring capability for mortgages using the Drools rule engine. For regulatory, I implemented EBAs "New Definition of Default" and support for the forbearance framework. Currently I am supervising the development of the rule engine for consumer loans scoring by leveraging the power of machine learning.