Context: Addiko Bank operated an in-house card processing service for 500,000 debit, 70,000 credit cards, 500 ATMs and Merchant Acquiring across five CEE countries. The outsourcing programme was critical to achieve compliance with various Visa/Mastercard, GDPR, and other EU mandates. The Programme was stuck in requirements definition phase and delays were unacceptable due to the planned IPO of the banking Group.

Action: Requested by the CEO to take over as Program Director, I took over the struggling initiative six months after the outsourcing agreement was signed with Fiserv. I co-ordinated five banks, 50+ colleagues, and 15 external providers (Visa, Mastercard, card production, ATM field services, data centers, data communication, etc.), managing internal and external senior stakeholders. I reorganised internal programme organisation and communication with 3^rd parties, managed the requirements definition, implementation and testing phases, orchestrated the migration of the full scope to a third-party processor (Fiserv), and led the change management to align all internal processes with the new processing ecosystem.

Result: Successfully completed the end-to-end outsourcing despite pandemic-related travel bans and restricted access to critical infrastructure. The migration improved operational efficiency, reduced costs, and strengthened service reliability across multiple countries.