Director of Project Portfolio

I turn ideas
into a working product

100+ people in delivery
RUB 500m+ program budget
9+ projects in the portfolio
2017+ in banking & fintech
Ilya Tsarev, IT project portfolio director in fintech

Useful when you need to

Land a portfolio on a date

Banking and fintech programs: credit, regulation, a launch date the sponsor can see.

Stand up a large delivery organisation

Employees, contractors, adjacent teams, budget and vendors. The organisation stays manageable.

Give leadership one picture

One status for executives. I run people, budget and dates, and take part in architecture decisions.

Cases with a business result

Problem → action → outcome

Innotech · lending

Digital loan servicing

Task: Cut load on branches.

What I did: Moved operations into internet and mobile banking.

Result: 10 → 2 minutes in branch.

Innotech · ML

Antifraud and scoring

Task: Cut vendor lock-in and tighten controls.

What I did: ML models and an operating cadence for the data team.

Result: Antifraud models in production; fraud controls strengthened.

Innotech · complaints

Complaints and claims

Task: Replace the case-management system (Jira Claim analogue).

What I did: Program plan, risks, delivery control.

Result: Replacement program closed: stages accepted on the agreed dates.

Otkritie Bank · internet banking

Internet bank in production

Task: Run the internet bank and speed up delivery.

What I did: Monitoring, CI/CD, team training.

Result: 500+ business and 300+ system metrics; 8 people, 70+ RHEL servers.

Experience and companies

04.2022 - present

Innotech

Director of Project Portfolio · since 2024 · 100+ people, RUB 500m+

Director of Projects · 2023-2024 · up to 30 people, RUB 100m+

Systems analyst · 2022-2023

Programs for a bank client: lending, BNPL, antifraud, vendor replacement. Hybrid, Saint Petersburg.

09.2021 - 04.2022

I-Teco

Systems analyst · banking integrations

Specs and APIs for microservices on OpenShift, Oracle, ESB-to-microservices migration.

03.2021 - 09.2021

Uralsib Bank

Technical lead

Scrum team, Jira backlog, first and second-line support in under two months.

11.2020 - 03.2021

Gazprombank

Chief engineer

Authentication platform: production stability, releases and capacity.

09.2017 - 11.2020

Otkritie Bank

Deputy head of department

Remote banking channels: internet and mobile bank, monitoring, CI/CD, team of 8, 70+ RHEL servers. Saratov.

What I run

Current scope: IT and business programs in fintech, from the business goal to production.

Program portfolio

Priorities, dates, budget, resource load, hiring and vendor payments. I take programs from the business goal to launch.

Teams and sponsor

Employees and contractors through team managers: goals, KPIs, escalations, unblocking. One status for the business, executives and regulators.

Delivery and production

Delivery pipelines, CI/CD, monitoring and SLAs. I influence architecture on the program landscape; teams own day-to-day implementation.

Keywords: PMO · delivery · budget · vendors · architecture · CI/CD · Kubernetes · Scrum · internet banking · lending · BNPL · antifraud

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