David Lau
Technology Leader | Foreign Exchange | Payments | Cloud
Hong Kong
Summary
Persistent leader eager to lead and grow organizations. Skilled in strategic planning, problem-solving, and communication with good understanding of business principles, project management and team leadership. Collaborative with relentless work ethic. Expert in foreign exchange, payments, cloud, digital identity, AI, ML and DLT. Adept in globally distributed systems design.
Overview
25
25
years of professional experience
5
5
years of post-secondary education
6
6
Certificates
2
2
Languages
Work History
Senior Partner Solution Architect
AWS
7 2022 - Current
- Supported partners in over 18 migration projects with project annual recurring revenue ranging from USD 300K to 900K – involved in various stages from infrastructure discovery, TCO analysis, migration strategy selection, migration planning and actual migration implementation
- Reviewed and fine-tuned partner-prepared migration project plans to help partners to earn trust from customers via advising on opportunities for server right-sizing, modernizing to cloud native services and ways to shorten elapsed time
- Led and coordinated multidisciplinary teams to optimize Migration Acceleration Program process for Hong Kong partners to cut down average project duration from 42 weeks down to 20 weeks
- This was achieved through introducing multiple internal teams to adopt project tracking practices for enhanced visibility to project milestones and enablement sessions to partners
- Proven fast learner to have acquired 5 AWS certifications within first year of joining AWS.
- Presented at industry conferences to share expertise and establish thought leadership within AWS Partner community
Digital Solution Architect
AIA Hong Kong
11.2020 - 07.2022
- Responsible for bringing in innovative technology and define new business use cases leveraging new technologies
- Initiated study of using NFT and blockchain technologies to facilitate loyalty programme for rewarding customer engagement activities with extensibilities to bond and exchange with other companies’ loyalty programme for partnership opportunities
- Led the very first metaverse based event setup for internal townhall, which gave first-hand experience to leaders of various business lines who in turn sparked ideas in using new technology for engaging customers, agents and internal staff
- Defined Contact Centre transformation to include deployment of AI into day-to-day operations within contact centre including: 1) AI for NLP for chatbot intent-response mapping, 2) AI for speech-to-text & text-to-speech to expose the chatbot to serve in both text & voice based channels, 3) speech analytics on conversations between callers and contact centre to improve operation efficiency, workforce planning, staff improvement and on-going chatbot training
- Defined end-to-end next-best-action recommendation solution for customers and alert agents to assist relevant customer in Social Media Prospecting Platform, which comprises of in-house ML model training and connections to multiple data sources within AIA to generate Leads and dispatch to agents to follow up while tracking Leads engagement status
- Took lead in defining MLOps operations to merge trained ML model with existing DevOps CI/CD pipeline to streamline model training with CI/CD
- Designed and deliver Intelligent Personal Assistant platform which is an intuitive chatbot based user interface providing guidance and assistance to insurance agents in order to achieve various sales KPIs
- Implemented multiple network zones in Azure Virtual Private Cloud for security segregation – trust zone, internal and external DMZ to extranet connectivity via reverse proxy
- Thought leadership and integration expertise sharing in weekly Design Authority architectural review to safeguard all upcoming solutions conforming to secure integration design, data access control and operation efficiency
- Led solution design by leveraging key Azure technology components like Azure Databricks (ADB), AKS, AKV, ADB, ADLS (Blob Storage), Managed Azure SQL PaaS, Power Platform with integrations with IBM Watson cloud and Tableau
Lead Payments Architect
livi Bank
08.2019 - 11.2020
- Architected Mastercard-based payment card system which automated backend reconciliation with card network as well as customer ledger systems with full pay back and interest integration for both debit and credit card offering.
- Fused loyalty programme into core card system by integrating with both in-house & partner’s loyalty programmes, offers gamification, instant discount and points-redemption into the Bank’s payment channels
- Designed and implemented the integration at both infrastructure and application level between HKICL and the core banking system and maintained high availability with disaster recovery.
- Leads the deployment of API Offering Platform both for partnership integration and Open API initiative
- Take leads on all technical integration discussions with partnering enterprises
Head of Innovation
Hang Seng Bank
08.2018 - 08.2019
- Co-developed API Centre as new payments and transfer channel with payments business team and led the design of Corporate API endpoints interface that enabled customer ERPs to integrate with
- Acted as implementation ambassador to collect requirements from customers, surveying customer env for security gaps and led PoC & initial integration activities
- Omni-channel Strategic Design, RPA for Ops Efficiency, Adopt AI to lower False Positive Credit Card Fraud Alert.
- Self-motivated, with a strong sense of personal responsibility.
Applied Innovation – Lead Solution Architect
HSBC Technology Services Asia
07.2016 - 08.2018
- Hands-on experience with biometrics products (fingerprints, facial recognition, iris, vein, behavioral)
- Conducted continuous integration pipeline proof-of-concept using Jenkins, Git, code scanning, testing
- Administered AWS and GCP cloud environments for innovation experiments
- Set up open banking API sandbox portal for hackathons
- Utilized Docker containers for automated deployment and testing
- Co-designed interbank eKYC project with HKMA involving distributed ledger technology (DLT)
- Collaborated on Lionrock project - a central bank-backed digital currency implementation using R3 Corda
- Drove machine learning proof-of-concept for handwritten Chinese OCR with continuous retraining
- Defined solution architecture patterns for cloud-based applications and API security
- Rearchitected monolithic personal internet banking to microservices on MuleSoft
- Established external hosting committee for architecture governance of cloud solutions
- Evolved technology scenarios into reusable solution patterns and blueprints
- Defined integrated communication and content management architecture
- Architected wealth management platform for trading securities, integrated with market data providers
- Designed risk profile questionnaire platform for regulatory compliance
Regional Solution Architect
AXA China Region
10.2009 - 09.2010
- Regional Target Operation – Peripheral Systems
- Designed the end-to-end solution options, identified all interfacing touch points to local systems that drove to heightened efficiency in RFP tender process
- Explained solutions with clarity to internal business analysts, IT Delivery and IT Operations teams to facilitate holistic estimates on the total cost of ownership including effort, timeline, and infrastructure.
Solution Architect
HSBC Software House
01.1999 - 09.2009
- Global Premier – Global Transfer and Account View
- OneHSBC Foreign Exchange – GetRate on Commercial Internet Banking
- OneHSBC Account Opening Funding
- Designed the global end-to-end architecture which facilitated single sign-on between entity channels while at the backend using EAI to integrate channel, payment engine, compliance/risks/fraud monitoring, 20+ core banking systems, treasury, foreign exchange settlement, e-messaging, business information, and monitoring & alerts
- Established strong partnership with Brazil, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Mexico, UK (London, Sheffield), US (Jersey City, Chicago, Buffalo, Tampa) spanning Project Management, Group ITO, Information Security, Group Compliance, Global Business team, Entity IT Architects , and Core Component Architects for Payment engine, Treasury FX systems, eMessaging domain, Global Customer Data Utility & Core HUB.
Education
Bachelor of Applied Science - Computing Science
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, BC, CANADA 09.1993 - 12.1998
Skills
Strategic leadership
Data-driven decision-making
Technology Roadmapping
Business process improvement
Operational Excellence
IT Management and delivery
Foreign Exchange
Payments
Banking
Insurance
Certification
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Timeline
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10-2025
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
10-2025
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional
10-2025
AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate
10-2025
AWS Certified Security – Specialty
09-2025
AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty
09-2025
Digital Solution Architect
AIA Hong Kong
11.2020 - 07.2022
Lead Payments Architect
livi Bank
08.2019 - 11.2020
Head of Innovation
Hang Seng Bank
08.2018 - 08.2019
Applied Innovation – Lead Solution Architect
HSBC Technology Services Asia
07.2016 - 08.2018
Regional Solution Architect
AXA China Region
10.2009 - 09.2010
Solution Architect
HSBC Software House
01.1999 - 09.2009
Bachelor of Applied Science - Computing Science
Simon Fraser University
09.1993 - 12.1998
Senior Partner Solution Architect
AWS
7 2022 - Current