Interview: Conceptualising and building bancon bPostingEngine

Dilan Latif has been an important part of the bancon team since 2013. A self-confessed tech geek, he combines a unique skillset of varied business knowledge with technical know-how to create unique tools that can be solutions. Using this experience, Dilan built the bPostingEngine prototype in 2014 and continues to be the product owner to this day. We had a virtual coffee break with Dilan to learn more about his experience and pick his brain on what makes bPostingEngine capabilities stand-out in the market.

So Dilan, let’s start with a bit about your background before joining the bancon team.

I studied Computer Science at University and went on to start a pHD, but I haven’t quite finished it yet, as you will hear I’ve been a bit busy. After University, I started my career in FinTech and for the first three years was across a lot of different projects as a developer, programming many banking interfaces.

From there, I moved into SAP ERP, again in finance, leading a team of around 28 people for my first ERP migration project. At this point in my career, I was the ‘techy guy’ but didn’t have the business knowledge. So, I started to spend more time learning. To understand both aspects and combine business with tech is quite unique in the industry and having both gave me a really strong standing in the world of SAP. As a result, I’ve worked on some amazing projects in gas, oil, automotive, pharmaceuticals, food and drink – a real variety of industries. We were the first global players in some financial migration scenarios, there weren’t many others involved in such complex migrations, and it’s always very exciting to be the pioneer.

Wow, that’s very impressive. What brought you to bancon?

I wanted to take everything I had learnt to a smaller consultancy. Bringing all my technical experience in design and implementation, along with my understanding of what companies really needed in finance, their pain points and common scenarios could have a much bigger impact at bancon, and I’ve now been with the company for almost 10 years.

So how was bPostingEngine born?

After so many years of experience on so many different projects, I got used to using lots of tools and knew what the strengths and weaknesses of each were. I saw an opportunity for a new tool that would make the migration of open financial transactions 100% audit proof, reduce complexity and the need for expert knowledge to operate them would cut the time from x to y by 90%. These benefits would provide a strong USP for the new tool.

I had a bit of downtime where I wasn’t on a live project, so I pitched the idea to our founders, Jörg and Bernhard. They gave me three months, a couple of colleagues to help out and within that time, the first prototype was built. SAP became very interested in what we had developed, and started pulling bancon in to use bPostingEngine on their projects. So far, it’s been used in 30 customer projects across the world.

You’ve mentioned there was a gap in the market for a new tool. What makes bPostingEngine so unique?

Making the posting platform dynamic was the most important thing, as our clients need the tech to be seamless. bPostingEngine minimises the downtime phase so the company is offline for a shorter amount of time, and in these big businesses time is money. We work a lot with SAP, and although they have their own posting engine, they often work with us to use bPostingEngine. The reason for this is that bancon’s product is more flexible and dynamic, it can be adapted immediately to the customer needs. It is bespoke to the customer and can be adapted without any limits. It’s been a huge success and has been used by global brands like Sanofi, Mondelez, P&G, GSK and AstraZenaca. It is also very intuitive, for example SAP introduced us to MultiPharma and with a limited budget we gave a few training sessions and they carried out the migration themselves – I am very proud of this.

What are you working on right now?

My main focus at the moment is a project for one of the big energy providers, it’s a huge company so it’s an exciting project. One of the best bits about my job at bancon is the variety of sectors we work with. Each project is different, because of this we are learning different industries and developing the tools to meet new challenges. No project is the same - this keeps us on our toes and pushes us to think of new solutions, which is exactly how bPostingEngine was born.

If you’re looking for a new career opportunity, take a look at our careers page or get in touch with Claudia Hoffmann.