I build the backend behind
cross-border payments.
Java and Spring Boot for FNB's foreign-exchange division, the engine behind currency conversions and international transfers. I also built SynthForge, a Spring Boot library published on Maven Central.
Careful with
other people's money.
I'm a Java developer in FNB's foreign-exchange division, working on cross-border payments. That includes TCIB, a real-time payments platform for the SADC region; the move from SWIFT MT to ISO 20022; and the Spring Boot API that connects a fraud detection model into the live payments pipeline.
Production support is part of the job. I'm on the on-call rotation for that fraud API, and I use MySQL to investigate why applications fail and why payments don't go through.
Outside FNB, I build developer tooling: SynthForge, my Spring Boot library on Maven Central, seeds related JPA entities with realistic fake data in the right order. Before that, my honours research at Wits became an IEEE-published paper on satellite image classification, co-authored with Ritesh Ajoodha.
Work and study.
Working on TCIB, a real-time cross-border payments platform for the SADC region, integrated with three regional banking partners and live since 2024. Built Spring Boot transformation microservices for the SWIFT MT to ISO 20022 MX migration, with XSD validation enforced at the inbound boundary. Built the Spring Boot API connecting the Illicit Flow Fraud Model into the live payments pipeline, and support it in production as part of the on-call rotation. Outside the Spring Boot work, the integrations with the legacy bank systems run over SOAP web services.
Two-month internship: drone and UAV computer vision work, plus a React document storage system that let managers filter and sort the specific clients they work with, using an internal sorting system.
Honours research on satellite image classification using HOG and DAISY features, published on IEEE Xplore and co-authored with Ritesh Ajoodha.
Undergraduate degree in computer science, covering programming, data structures, and algorithms.
The tools I
work with.
Most of this is my day-to-day stack at FNB; the frontend tools are for my own projects, including this site.
Selected work.
SynthForge
Java 21 · Spring Boot · Maven CentralA JPA-aware fake data seeding library for Spring Boot, published to Maven Central. Faker generates realistic values but has no idea your entities are related. SynthForge reads JPA relationships directly and seeds a valid, correctly ordered object graph from a single annotation, with no seed script to write or maintain.
Bankwave V2.0 - Microservices Banking Platform
Java · Spring Boot · MicroservicesA banking backend split into accounts, loans and cards microservices, built with Spring Boot 3, Spring Cloud Config and Docker Compose.
Satellite Image Classification
Python · HOG + DAISY · SVMAn IEEE-published study, co-authored with Ritesh Ajoodha, on classifying satellite land use with a classical feature-descriptor pipeline: global HOG and local DAISY features combined through Bag of Features and classified with an SVM, reaching 81.76% accuracy across 21 scene categories on the UC Merced dataset.
Say hello.
Questions about SynthForge, the research or anything on this page? Send a message below or reach me on LinkedIn.