Merlin Sandhiya Mani

Project & Responsibilities: Confidential and not for public disclosure

Project: Consumer Technology – Financial Crime Controls Uplift

• Develop clear, detailed, and comprehensive user stories for technical development and testing teams, ensuring all functional and non-functional requirements are fully understood and accurately implemented.
• Support Business and Technology stakeholders in uplifting Foreign Tax Residency (FTR) and Positive Affirmation controls, conducting end-to-end analysis to ensure full alignment with ATO compliance obligations under the JUNO regulatory initiative.
• Manage the uplift and enhancement of FinCrime APIs, including the upgrade of Group Customer Master APIs to newer versions, ensuring seamless integration, improved performance, and minimal downstream impact across dependent systems.
• Produce high-quality project documentation, including Business Requirements Documents (BRDs), technical specifications, solution design inputs, data requirements, and user experience persona mappings for clear traceability and solution assurance.
• Translate business requirements into actionable technical deliverables, bridging the gap between business intent and system implementation through user stories, refined acceptance criteria, and solution design walkthroughs.
• Collaborate closely with business stakeholders and data owners, providing clarity on scope boundaries, data sourcing, transformation rules, dependencies, and expected business outcomes.
• Led cross-functional teams, ensuring alignment on design decisions, delivery timelines, and the implementation of FinCrime and compliance-related capabilities.
• Create end-to-end system flows, data flow diagrams, and process models to illustrate customer data movement, system interactions, integration points, and ATO reporting flows across the FTR and FinCrime ecosystem.

Project: Business Lending - Capital Optimisation

• Socialize business requirements received from the Modelling team with technical teams and cross-functional stakeholders, ensuring consistent understanding and alignment across delivery streams.
• Support Capital Optimization initiatives aimed at uplifting multiple Business Lending risk models, contributing to a strategic program targeted to save $1 billion in capital reserves.
• Developed clear, comprehensive, and structured user stories—including Acceptance Criteria written in Gherkin format—in alignment with Westpac Ways of Working, ensuring clarity for both technical and business stakeholders.
• Analyse and document enhancements to Customer Risk Grade (CRG) calculations for Property Investment and Property Development models, ensuring a shift from subjective assessments to data-driven risk evaluation.
• Collaborate with Modelling, Credit Risk, and Data teams to translate complex model uplift requirements into clear business and technical specifications.
• Facilitate workshops to refine risk assessment criteria, ensuring alignment between business intent, modelling logic, and system implementation.
• Evaluate and document the transition away from SQIs (Subjective Qualitative Inputs) for LGD (Loss Given Default) calculation, supporting the design of new objective, data-driven methodologies.
• Perform impact assessments for model uplifts, identifying downstream system, process, data, and reporting implications across Business Lending platforms.
• Support end-to-end model uplift delivery, including requirement gathering, validation, testing support, and business readiness activities for updated model calculations.
• Ensure traceability between model requirements, user stories, and functional deliverables, maintaining alignment across modelling, technology, and credit risk stakeholders.
• Provide ongoing stakeholder communication and updates, ensuring transparency on progress, risks, decisions, and impacts related to model uplift initiatives.

Project: Cash and Transaction Banking – Servicing Requests and BOaPS

• Lead and facilitate all core Scrum ceremonies, including Daily Stand-ups, Sprint Planning, Sprint Reviews, Sprint Retrospectives, PI Planning, and Backlog Refinement sessions, ensuring efficient collaboration and continuous improvement.
• Manage and coordinate multiple projects within the Cash & Transaction Banking domain, ensuring alignment with business priorities and organisational strategic goals.
• Ensure program scope alignment with strategic objectives, providing recommendations for scope adjustments or process improvements to enhance delivery effectiveness.
• Drive the squad’s performance against DeltaX badges, guiding the team to meet required criteria and stay on track for month-on-month achievement.
• Validate user stories for readiness, ensuring clear descriptions and Gherkin-formatted Acceptance Criteria that are fully understandable to technology teams.
• Facilitate cross-stream collaboration, resolving inter-stream dependencies and ensuring smooth coordination across program workstreams.
• Engage and manage stakeholders during project go-live, developing and delivering communication materials, status updates, and impact assessments.
• Design and execute deployment and communication plans, collaborating with key stakeholders to ensure successful releases and business readiness.
• Work closely with business and development teams to support objective planning, ensuring requirements are translated effectively into technical design and implementation.
• Monitor and manage team capacity and sprint velocity, identifying potential bottlenecks and enabling the team to deliver commitments on time.
• Provide leadership and coaching to the squad, fostering a high-performance culture, bridging gaps in agile practices, and promoting continuous improvement.
• Maintain RAID logs (Risks, Assumptions, Issues, Dependencies) and facilitate discussions with stakeholders to ensure timely resolution.

Project: Basel 3 Regulatory Project

• Analyse COBOL modules and JCL programs to extract required data elements, derive transformation rules, and support Enterprise Information Management (EIM) data lineage and data quality assessments.
• Develop transformation logic for Key Map Repository as part of decomposition analysis, ensuring accuracy and completeness of data mappings.
• Create comprehensive “As-Is” and “To-Be” process maps, documenting current-state data flows and future-state target architecture to support regulatory and technical alignment.
• Collaborate closely with account management teams to ensure alignment with customer needs, expectations, and satisfaction throughout the project lifecycle.
• Provide leadership and guidance to team members, supporting requirement understanding, delivery planning, and timely execution of assigned user stories.
• Identify and resolve delivery blockers, ensuring the team is supported in managing workloads, understanding dependencies, and meeting project timelines.
• Engage with clients to understand detailed requirements, providing timely clarifications, insights, and resolutions to data-related queries.
• Analyse data across three major warehouses—Mainframe, Unix, and Informatica—identifying Critical Data Elements (CDEs) and tracing them end-to-end back to source systems.
• Perform detailed data lineage assessment, identifying existing data quality checks and documenting data transformations across Westpac’s enterprise data platforms.
• Query Teradata databases to identify Risk-Weighted Asset (RWA) calculation fields and map them accurately to relevant modelling variables.
• Identify and integrate source data for CREDR transition variables, ensuring correct modelling and migration into the SRDE system.
• Model and map schema tables, working with structured repositories to support Basel III regulatory reporting and data traceability.
• Analyse end-to-end data flows across Mainframe, Big Data, Informatica, and Teradata environments, deriving transformation logic for RWA-related variables and identifying authoritative source systems.

Project: Trade Management System (TMS)

• Lead the migration of the Trade Management System from Microfocus v6 to Microfocus Enterprise Server v23, ensuring stability, functional accuracy, and minimal business disruption.
• Manage the Scrum board and story quality, facilitating core Scrum ceremonies including Daily Stand-ups, Sprint Planning, Reviews, and Retrospectives to drive team delivery.
• Perform pre-batch and post-batch file comparisons, validating data integrity, analysing discrepancies, and ensuring accurate output generation during migration cycles.
• Coordinate testing activities with downstream systems, ensuring upgraded environment feeds are validated and fully aligned with integration requirements.
• Register and configure host SFTP servers, conducting connectivity testing and ensuring secure data transfer channels during and after migration.
• Execute and validate jobs in the upgraded environment, ensuring all batch jobs, processes, and system behaviours perform as expected in v23.
• Utilise Service First Portal for effective Change Management, Incident Management, and Problem Management to support controlled delivery and production stability.
• Use GIT Bash for version control and TeamCity for deployment to manage changes from UAT through to Production, ensuring adherence to CI/CD and release governance processes.
• Implement FTP-to-SFTP migration updates, ensuring secure file transfer protocols and compliance with enterprise security standards.
• Debug and analyse code in the MS Application Project, supporting issue resolution, system enhancements, and migration defect fixes.

Project: Frontier Finance – Finance Technology

• Perform end-to-end analysis, development, and application support for reconciliation-related mainframe systems, ensuring accurate and timely processing.
• Test and validate batch modules, creating and executing Autosys test scripts to ensure stability, correctness, and compliance with business requirements.
• Analyse and resolve production issues in mainframe jobs, including long-running jobs, file unavailability, empty file scenarios, and other operational failures impacting reconciliation processes.
• Manage application artefacts and configurations, including updating AIT, application interfaces, architecture documents, and system hierarchies.
• Handle Change Management, Incident Management, and Problem Management responsibilities, ensuring controlled deployments and timely issue resolution.
• Conduct detailed Root Cause Analysis (RCA) for job abends and system failures, implementing permanent fixes to prevent recurrence.
• Work with core mainframe components, including VSAM files, GDGs, and CA7 job scheduling, to support batch operations and system enhancements.
• Participate in Disaster Recovery (DR) exercises for the Frontier Finance application, ensuring system resilience and readiness for business continuity scenarios.
• Develop and deploy new P&L reports on the mainframe platform, ensuring successful implementation and availability for end-report users.
• Utilize DB2 and Easytrieve programs to build, enhance, and support reporting capabilities required for reconciliation and financial processing.