About

Wonderful Payments Ltd / Asima • February 2022 - Present

Leading development of Open Banking platform (wonderful.co.uk, asima.co.uk) built with Laravel, supporting Payment Initiation Service (PIS) and Account Information Services (AIS) with 90%+ UK bank coverage
Pioneered AI-assisted development workflows using Claude Code, Amazon Kiro, and Gemini, achieving 5-10x improvement in project delivery times
Led infrastructure migration from AWS to Google Cloud Platform, implementing Cloud Run containerization and VertexAI fraud detection pipeline
Rebuilt development team, replacing offshore contractors with in-house developers and implementing modern CI/CD practices

Twindig Ltd • February 2020 - February 2022

Designed and developed Property Technology platform in Laravel from inception
Built fault-tolerant cloud architecture with decoupled session management, Redis caching, event-driven design, and zero-downtime deployments
Established remote-first engineering culture with Kanban workflows, peer reviews, and continuous integration practices

Upad • January 2017 - October 2019

Led fully remote development team, redesigning legacy systems for scale and reliability
Architected new DigitalOcean cloud infrastructure with secure, fault-tolerant design
Built provider-agnostic payment processing platform and integrated Onfido identity verification for KYC checks

Crowdcube • January 2013 - February 2016

Architected payments system processing £100M+ in annual crowdfunding transactions using Direct Debit and card payments
Led infrastructure migration from single server to distributed, load-balanced Rackspace cloud supporting 10,000+ simultaneous users
Refactored application for horizontal scaling and introduced agile workflows, moving from Subversion to Git

2007 - 2013

PHP Technical Lead at Invitation Digital, Development Manager at Evosite, and developer roles at BrightPearl, Webeurope, and Insured Risks Limited

John Blackmore