Speakers

John Davies

Velo Payments

John is co-founder and CTO of Velo Payments. Started in 2017 with 3 co-founders, good funding and the engineering team from his previous company. Velo Payments has over 50 engineers, integrated to several banks and in production since 2018 and making payment globally. It’s basically Java in SpringBoot in Docker on Linux in the cloud.

John’s has over 35 years in IT, after astrophysics at UCL, he went straight into assembler and C programming in the City (of London). moving then into C++ and later into Java in 95. John wrote several Enterprise Java books for Wrox in the early 00s and was a chief instructor and author of Learning Tree’s Java courses. John headed up FX at Paribas then global chief architect as BNP Paribas and later at JP Morgan. He co-founded C24, an integration company specialising in SWIFT, FpML, ISO-20022 etc. in 2000 which was sold to a NASDAQ company in 2007, he then bought it back in 2011 and sold it again to a UK-listed company in 2016.

Over the [many] years John has become an advocate for “down to the metal” architecture. Today we seem to have forgotten how powerful the machines we are using are and settle for something that is typically only 10% of what can really be achieved. Abstraction and laziness leave us accepting what we have and that doesn’t scale. Today he spends a lot of time working on AI and the mathematics behind it. He’s a keen cyclist doing around 200km a week. He is married to a French wife and has 3 boys (21, 18 & 16) who all love travelling (as long as there’s internet).

Session:
Java Microservices with Spring Boot - Size matters!