Michele Garofalo

SENIOR BUSINESS & SYSTEM ANALYST, PROJECT/PRE-SALES MANAGER
Cost & Benefit reporting | Business and Technical Solutions Requirement | Full Project Life-cycle Management| Operations Management

Accomplished IT project management, business analyst and developer professional with more than 25 years of overall experience (15+ as Business & System Analyst) positively impacting business operations through strategic study/ development / implementation of technical solutions

Skilfully allocate resources and provide team members with the training, guidance, support and motivation to surpass challenging objectives. Equipped with a strong background in the innovative development of complex systems, increasing productivity and contributing to corporate bottom line. Advanced collaborator and communicator (English Italian) with all levels of staff, management, and clients.

My current major skill and attitude is in the role of Business and System Analyst with a strong background for international company (Banks) especially in the Foreign Dept. (Trade Finance [Import/Export], Payment sector, Account, General ledger,...)

One of my personal strength is the capability to get the trust worthiness of the customer/stakeholder and create a good relationship with the end-users, without missing to show professionalism and dedication to the end-users needs. For this reason normally have a smooth impact over the business data gathering and pre-sale activities:

Constant intention to find the simplest and better solution to solve customer requirements and to perform in the same time new proposal to mitigate eventual criticism on the workflow process or suggest new ideas to adapt end-user work/process with the intention to make the ‘work easier and/or more efficient and on-the line with the new technology tendency.

‘Transfer business requirement in a useful, clear and detailed functional analysis (using standard office tools or specific UML end PML products) for the project management and technical team. Preparing time elapse planning and details of output requirements for test
cases and data setup/ migration for production start-up.

Usual to work in a constant and closely relationship with the Sales Management to prepare the eventual pre-sale activities and the relevant offers, as well as with the developers team from the beginning, after customer/end user analysis's acceptance, tithe stress test and production start-up.

Usual to prepare different documentations to separate the current/old “data & infrastructure” and "workflow process" status to the proposed solution (normally reached after the end of the Investigation at customer side) where is normally empathized the impact on the customer/user side (such as: time's process, possible criticism & stop, other) . Document
provided to verbalize: inquires (remote or customer side), identify IT & Business structure at customer side (for acceptance), detailed entity & relationship (textual and via UML) within the various System and/or OS utilized and between different sector/procedure, DataBase analysis,
verification (test and start-up)

Usual to prepare and share separate documentation with internal teams and/or customer’s teams, using as much as possible link reference between different documentations but relevant to the same project/products/object, paying attention the the security and grant for access and/or editing, hopefully in a cloud storage. Usual to pay the right attention to the documents organization that can save time and effort to perform communications and obtain the relevant project and information.


Usual to conduct self-organized customer requirements, inquiry within the customers ‘areas (or via remote channels) with one or more head-officer at the same time from different culture/countries/accents and general ability to conducting stakeholder interviews in a point-to-paint discussion, following the workflow processor established guidelines.

Customer workshop/training/demo to explain product functionalities to achieve familiarity with eventually new products and/or work's process. Usual to prepare demo-presentation with a simple shape but good impact possibly using a specific preformed environment for demo/ pre-sale activities.

In the last several years working in a international company, where i get in use to remotely work & collaborate ( from Italy or Japan , Austria/ London/Dubai etc.) with the company’s team or customer's team, by phone, skype, else..
other internal tools, paying attention to the different time zones and accents. Usual to work with data exchange trough remote server network or web-cloud. As well as to work in office for short or medium-long period to perform brain storming with the project management or developer team.

Main Area covered — Trade Finance and Payment solutions (Product Vendor)

- Investigation Analysis centred to point-out business and technical customer requirements (such as adapting to local policies, internal standards & methodology, technical infrastructure).

- Design and implementation of technical solutions focused on adapting the existing solution to fulfil customer requirements and management platform.

- Drive successful completion of assigned projects within Market and Counterparty, collaborating with clients in needs assessment and planning. Provide back-end and frontend analysis and/or software development. Ensure compliance with corporate regulations, reporting and practices through training.
Manage startup and setup / implementation for local market analysis.

- Delivering workflow process and configuration customer / internal side, remote coordination for analysis as well as for development and update team work infrastructure (source, configuration) application across Italy/Japan and Austria (Vienna) or customer side (Europe/Middle East).

- Presale activity coordinator for Middle East, Asia and Presale activity for all European customers.

I've conducted or participated to a different pre-sale activities across Europe, Asia, Middle East.

Detailed areas:

— Workflow process (analysis and development for adaptation to internal policy/standard) such a
Transaction Procession, Inquiry and verification, End-User confirmation, Accounting & Financing/Loan,
Historical Archive, Delivery to customer side (trough, snail mail, email, web front-end, server...), post process survey, batch process...

—Payment area: Analysis and develop of the customer's business and system requirements (such as:
international payments, internal and local government Accounting, Adjustment rate Calculation, Fees, ...

—Overall Trade Finance Bank's dept., such as: LC Import/Export, Bills under LC I/E, Collection, Bill for
Collections, Shipping Guarantee, Exp. LC Advicing, Le Confirmation, Invoice Financing...

—International payment platform @ International payment platform (SWIFT) or local Bank's messages network (business and technical
implementations) migration between different infrastructures, Analysis and development of data
adaption).
Interaction between Bank's offices and branches, interactions between Bank & Customer front-end,
supply chain (from the Bank to the customer trough the financing parties till the vectors).
— Layout Output & Reporting (Adaptation to internal requirements/standards)

—Customer front-end analysis for adaptation and interaction with Customer ERP system,
institutional WEB platform and SWIFT-TSU (interaction between Bank and Customer or Customer to
Customer and delivery system trough secure network or cloud) — Platform and data migrations (setup and/or mapping of data migration).

—Reporting for internal check or delivering data/info B2B or B2C (Back-End) or C2B (frontend)

For all the above points | normally followed the inquiry at customer side for Business and System analysis and
adjustment developing, workflow process setup, stress-test, configuration, reporting and customer training and
trough the Design Tool provided by the company's product (Trade Finance Doka) I've personally developed new
feature or customized the already built in functionalities.

Followed many customer world-wide, primary client in Europe, Asia, Middle East, such a:

Royal Bank of Scotland, Unicredit Bank, Caixa General de Deposit, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena (Italy and
foreign branches), National Bank of Abu Dhabi, & many others.

Successful completion as conductor and responsible of pre-sale activity for some Banks in Europe (Portugal,
Italy, Belgium, UAE, Hong Kong).

For the following Banks | was responsible of the area and main conductor of the pre-sale activities, all successfully conducted:

— RAK BANK (Dubai) (Smartstream VP Christian Schieble, Bank no more in UAE)

— FIRST GULF BANK (Abu Dhabi) ref. Mathanagopal Raman (FGB consultant)

- NBAD (Abu Dhabi) ref. T Ranganathan (Executive Director -Trades Services and Trade Finance).

In a friendly structure we have prepared a dynamic software to handle hundred thousands of different Swift messages in a completely dynamic way. The product was tested and verified by the Bank but for unknown reasons not taken in production. The experience was worthy and anyway succesfull

I spent 11 years in this company where I worked mainly for a Big group of Banks in very different scenarios, data migration, Analysing software improvement, delivering software update or newly made, study (system, strategic, cost & benefit, else) and business and regulatory updates, at the customer site for different purpose.
I touched various areas of the Bank, like Account, Financing, Trade Finance, Swift worldwide payments, and many others. I made those mainly as Business Analyst and Project Manager, since usually those were conducted by me simultaneously.
But I never left the coding, where especially for the Trade Finance product, I was developing and adapting an external system to fulfil the Bank`s needs and local regulatory.

I spent more than 8 years in Rome with this company (previously named Progres2) where I start my experience as IBM AS/400 (RPG) Software Developer then Analyst Programmer and Account Manager for a small division of a big chain of customers (Banks), where my duty was to develop the system, preparing software deliveries, making telephone assistance and on-site consultancy (more then hundred installations, setup and training at customer site).