Discover Financial Services (a Capital One company)
Brought in to set the technology direction for a newly formed Partner Enablement and Experience domain — then to carry it through the Capital One merger. Accountable for architecture, engineering and data strategy for Discover and Diners partner-experience and payment platforms, and for platform convergence after the merger.
Partner Enablement and Experience was a newly formed domain with a sprawling estate of in-house, SaaS and legacy applications. Functionality was duplicated across systems, and the partner and customer experience suffered for it.
Onboarding a new partner took 73 days, with manual steps — including testing — along the way. Applications were slow, Party Hierarchy performance was poor, and legacy applications and the modern Profile data were frequently out of sync.
Diners applications lacked a clear technology direction and carried open vulnerabilities, and PCI DSS 4.0 compliance was a pressing requirement across the estate. The brief: make the platforms resilient, expose them through APIs, and move to an event-driven architecture.
May – Jul 2023
Defined the North Star for Partner Enablement and Experience: platform consolidation, and modernisation wherever it paid back. Standardised on event-driven architecture with a domain-driven model, CQRS and hexagonal architecture.
Aug – Dec 2023
Designed and led the move of Profile data from the data centre to a highly resilient, multi-region, multi-cluster OpenShift platform on AWS (US East and US West). Ran a GraphQL proof of concept on MongoDB Atlas for Party Hierarchy, and managed the MongoDB vendor relationship, including contract management and risk analysis.
Jan – May 2024
Assessed the impact of the post-merger volume surge on availability, SLAs and SLOs. Worked with the Integration Management Office to prioritise scalability work, brought in third-party contractors to scale capacity fast, and supported successful testing of the Capital One network transition.
May 2024 onwards
Led platform convergence and the new P3 solution to eliminate duplicate functionality and unify the customer experience, cutting partner onboarding from 73 days to 5–7. Introduced Agentic AI to the Referral Management Service to absorb the post-merger surge.
“Srini set clear technical direction and consistently brought the right issues to leadership’s attention, influencing decisions with sound judgment rather than just executing instructions.”
“Srini led the development of a comprehensive vision for a consolidated customer portal that unified the customer experience, eliminated friction points, and significantly improved overall customer satisfaction.”
“High-demand work tends to route through a manager first, and instead of passing that pressure down, he absorbed it himself.”
“No matter how challenging the situation, he remains cool and helps the team focus on finding the right solution rather than assigning blame.”
Silos are rarely a structure problem — they're a trust problem. Remove the fear of blame and collaboration follows.
When a leader owns the mistakes and gives away the credit, teams stop protecting themselves and start protecting the outcome.
Contact
I'm based in London, UK. Whether it's a leadership role, an advisory engagement or a transformation that needs shaping — my inbox is open.
srini.vankee@gmail.com