Cornel Toma

Own a multi-million-dollar transformation program for ING's global pricing platform in Wholesale Banking / Financial Markets. Scope spans application decomposition, market data ingestion redesign, enterprise observability, infrastructure modernization, analytics tooling, and regulatory compliance.

Static Data Platform Redesign: Decomposed a tightly coupled monolithic static-data application into an independently deployable microservices architecture, removing single points of failure.

Market Data Optimization: Market Data Optimization: Deployed a unified ingestion pipeline for market-data services, resolving production performance bottlenecks. Built data-filtering in the ingestion layer to deliver asset-class-specific data streams (FX Spot, Commodity Futures) to downstream trading and analytics consumers.

Enterprise Observability Platform: Ran the enterprise-wide rollout of a unified observability and monitoring platform across the pricing and trading ecosystem, with cross-team maturity assessments and gap-remediation tracking. Result: standardized monitoring, faster incident detection and recovery, and infrastructure-utilization visibility.

Database Infrastructure Migration (BMaaS): Led migration of database workloads from legacy infrastructure to Bare Metal as a Service. Coordinated pipeline deployment, firewall-rule replication, SQL Server setup, and functional and performance testing; validated benchmarks to support the production migration decision.

Regulatory Compliance & API Security (DORA): Leading rollout of an API intermediation layer to replace direct database connections from Front Office, Trading, and Sales with controlled, auditable API access, meeting DORA requirements.

Delivered IT programs across global enterprise subsidiaries, aligning technical execution with corporate strategy.

Global Data Lifecycle & Cost Optimization Program ($10M annual cost avoidance): Ran a global program to optimize petabytes of legacy SharePoint and Teams storage across WPP subsidiaries. Deployed AvePoint Opus to archive inactive content to Azure Blob Storage, clean version history, and remediate orphaned content; standardized the group-wide retention policy. Result: $10M annual cost avoidance and a sustainable retention framework.

GroupM Cloud Transition Program (Azure Multi-Tenant Migration & Modernization): Led cloud engineering teams migrating hundreds of Azure subscriptions and workloads from legacy tenants into enterprise Azure Landing Zones built on Microsoft's Cloud Adoption Framework, across WPP's major operating companies. Ran a phased rollout from pilot through six execution phases, covering app-owner engagement, subscription onboarding, RBAC and security-baseline assessment, remediation tracking, and operational handover.

Cloud Operating Model & Governance: Defined the engagement model between operating companies and the central Cloud Hub, allocating responsibility across Access Management (EntraID, PIM, MFA), Platform Engineering (Azure security baseline, CI/CD and IaC), and Maintenance & Operations (patching, monitoring, backup). Result: clear boundaries between agency-managed and centrally-managed workloads.

Owned end-to-end delivery and international rollout of StudioGo, a custom enterprise hybrid-work platform for seat reservation, meeting rooms, floor mapping with real-time occupancy, and team scheduling across Cognizant's global hubs. Led a 16-person cross-functional team (front-end, back-end, UX, QA) from proof of concept to production scaling.

Took the platform from proof of concept to a highly available deployment across multiple international hubs. Managed the full product lifecycle: scope, sprint planning, backlog governance, release management, user feedback, and post-deployment iteration.

Migrated scheduling and authentication from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 / Active Directory, including calendar and Teams integration.

Gave leadership data on office utilization, occupancy, and team co-location to support capacity planning under the hybrid-work model.