Professional Summary

• Result-oriented, accomplished and spirited Business Analyst with a proven track record of more than 8 years experience in business analysis and project management.
• Subject Matter Expertise in Securities Lending, Custody, Reference Data Integration, Basel II accord, Cash Management processes and Repurchase Agreements (classic Repo and Sell/Buy Backs).
• Thorough knowledge of financial and investment management industry in diverse areas such as Risk management and analyses, Portfolio management, Fund accounting, Fixed income instruments, MBS, and amongst other major aspects of Investment Banking and Investment Management.
• Experienced in serving as primary liaison between business group and technology team throughout the Project Life Cycle.
• Experienced in project charters and project plans development and business requirements gathering & requirements analysis.
• Work experience includes effective implementation of Requirement Management, Change Control Management, Defect Prevention Management, Release management and Project Management tasks throughout the project life cycle (PLC).
• Excellent team player with ability to work on multiple tasks and also work independently with minimum supervision.

Professional Skills

• Exemplary knowledge and experience in the Financial Investment Banking industry with clear conceptual understanding of various financial instruments such as equities, bonds, fixed income securities and derivatives, and asset/portfolio management.
• Strong analysis and communication skills with an ability to transform the needs of stakeholders into Functional/Technical requirements backed with experience and education in financial domain.
• Strong experience in gathering requirements, documenting requirements, defining project plans and writing system test plans and developing test scenarios.
• Gained solid experience as a primary liaison between business group and technology team throughout the Project Life Cycle.
• Thorough understanding of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and their variants; employed best practices in project management and business requirements gathering.
• Extensive experience with process modeling, flow charts, sequence & activity Diagrams and Use Cases using UML and Visio.
• Hands on experience in front end application testing to develop and review test plans, test scenarios, test cases and test data sets.
• Designed the UAT test plans, schedules and handled the entire responsibility for UAT testing, Defect resolutions and issue resolutions including the implementation of issue escalation procedures.
• Acquired hands on experience in software testing with solid skills in developing Test approach, Test plans and scripts, Test cases and Defect Status Reports.
• Solid experience in Business Process Modeling, Gap analysis, Impact analysis and root cause analysis in complex client server and financial system projects; expertise in data flow modeling, business rules identification and business process flow analysis.
• Conducted UAT testing and User Training sessions along with developing the user training manuals; adequate experience in writing SQL queries to retrieve and test the data from databases.
• Possess good documentation skills and ability to work with minimum supervision.

Projects Technical Environment

Databases: Oracle, Sybase, DB2, MS SQL, MS Access.

MS Office: MS Access, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, MS Project.

Operating Systems: Unix, Win NT/Win2k/XP, Linux.

Market Data Sources: Bloomberg, Reuters, Moody’s, ADP.

Scripting and Programming: SQL, C++, JAVA,HTML,XML, ASP,JSP, Adobe Flex.

Tools: RequisitePro, ClearQuest, Mercury Test Director, HP Quality Center, QTP, TOAD, Serena Team Track, SWIFT messaging system.

Modeling Tools: MS Visio, Snag It, UML, Rational Rose.

Methodologies: Rational Unified Process, UML, Waterfall, SDLC.

Work Experience: Roles and Responsibilities

Confidential, NY May ’11 - Present

Sr. Business Analyst

Capital Markets – Corporate Actions & Supplemental Listing Applications

The Project involves design and development of Corporate Actions and Listing Compliance modules and the various sub-modules. The primary purpose of the project is to provide an end to end workflow between the Listing Compliance & Regulation and the Corporate Actions/Operations modules along with the inter-connectivity with the multiple interfaces such as Edgar Online, eGovDirect, Xpress feed, etc. providing regular data feeds.

Role & Responsibilities:

• Requirement gathering, analyzing and base lining the Business Requirement specifications.
• Translated the business requirements specifications into functional specifications and GUI specifications based on business rules and company listing/delisting rules and procedures as per the SEC guidelines and NYSE policies.
• Automation of publishing Ticker notices to the market based on business rules governed by Corporate Actions and Market Watch business teams.
• Monitor various module tasks from initiation through transition and organize interdepartmental or cross-functional team activities ensuring completion of project tasks on schedule.
• Served as a primary liaison between the business teams and the technology teams located onshore and offshore.
• Performed Gap analysis and developed data Normalization rules for companies listed on American Stock Exchange to bring them onboard the new web-based application.
• Developed Business Process Work Flows and Functional Diagrams using MS Visio.
• Assisted Data analyst help develop Data architecture for the migration of historical records from existing Listing and Compliance application to the newly developed web-based application.
• Planned the UAT testing, test plans, test cases and worked with the business users for UAT test execution & assisted in developing the training documentation.
• Executed end to end business level testing and full-scale production parallel testing.
• Involved in application deployment in Pre-Prod environment ensuring the migration of data to be tested for production parallel testing.
• Streamlined the requirements/enhancements for Post-production release based on business priority to technological severity analyses and mappings.

Confidential, NY Jun ‘10 – May ‘11

Business Analyst

PB Fixed Income Repo (Domestic & International)

Futures & Options Strategies

Worked on multiple projects in the domain of Prime Brokerage Fixed Income (PBFI) and Futures & Options (F&O) Strategies.

A. The Domestic piece of PB FI Repo was initiated to enhance and optimize the current domestic process flow, analyze and reconcile the EOD reports. Significant changes were to be incorporated in the front end user application followed by detailed documentation and supporting test approach.

B. The non-$ piece of PB FI Repo process was initiated to migrate the existing application with more efficient vendor based application, already proven efficient on the domestic business space. A few of the upstream and downstream applications flows were modified to match with the batch processing and with the newly created entity for the international business space.

C. The F&O Real Time Trade Matching project was initiated to provide a trade matching logic for two of the electronic trading platforms on-boarded for the first phase. The FIX execution feeds and clearing feeds were processed through several layers where the data normalization, conversion to FIXML and complex event processing was involved for the predefined matching results.

Role & Responsibilities:

• Gathered the requirements and analyzed the potential modifications required for the retirement of applications to a vendor based front end application.
• Coordinated JAD sessions to identify business process rules and application requirements to prepare the BRD drafts and the current and proposed cross-application process flows.
• Provided primary liaisons between business/operations/core processing technology team and external development team.
• Created business requirements specs and converted them into functional/system specifications.
• Created data mapping rules and FIX custom tags logic for product reference data enrichment required for the matching purpose; varied for different exchanges.
• Involved in data flow architecture changes for enhancing the data distribution performance and pub/sub mechanism.
• Effectively interacted with developers and users for change requests, performed Gap analysis and impact analysis for issue resolutions/escalations.
• Performed high level end to end business application and trade flow testing and directed the testing team for carrying out various positive and negative test scenarios.
• Extensively used HP Quality Center, and MS excel for generating the daily maintained MQC list of defects and enhancements.
• Involved in developing and executing system and UAT test plans; developed and maintained the test scripts with the necessary screenshots for reporting purpose.
• Conducted the user training sessions with the business desk and obtained sign-offs for meeting the target release dates.
• Provided post-production support to the business desk and maintained updated presentation decks for presentation during the regular Project status calls.

Confidential, MA State Street Jan ‘08 – May ‘10

Sr. Business Analyst/Project Manager

Worked on Multiple Securities Lending assignments which included the following major initiatives:

A. AutoRAL Project: - Worked on a project initiative which was to improve operational efficiency by automating the manually intensive reallocation process performed by the sell desks for covering the negatives caused by pending client sells. The initiative also provided the sell desk with the ability to control the automated process by means of an auto reallocation stop switch and configurable market rules.

B. Virtual Cash Pooling: - Worked on a project which was a component of the larger effort of Pooled Asset Liability Matching Solution (PALMs). The initiative was to provide the virtual cash pools for equities & fixed income using a flexible and cost-effective pooled vehicle.

C. Non-cash collateral application migration: - Migration of non-cash collateral engine to a new loan collateral management component in Securities lending Enterprise and systematically retired the existing non cash collateral system ensuring the accuracy & validation of the data from existing system to the new system.

Also supported other miscellaneous on-going projects such as SWIFT Instruction Release management, Third Party Securities Lending (TPL) and Corporate Actions Restrictions.

Role & Responsibilities:

• Gathered business requirements through user interviews and interactions with various subject matter experts (SMEs).
• Analyzed business requirements using requirement arbitrage process and assigned appropriate priorities to each requirements.
• Responsible for identifying the data requirements, analyzing them and preparing data mappings and data dictionaries.
• Involved in developing project charter, project plans and in identifying the major milestones and tasks along with the schedules.
• Effectively conducted the JAD sessions and finalized the user requirement specifications.
• Translated the user requirements specifications into functional specifications and prepared the business process models, data flow diagrams (DFD) using MS Visio.
• Effectively managed the requirements and requirement change requests during various phases of project life cycle and initiated a repository to store change requests for future considerations.
• Involved in preparing the test cases for functional and integration testing with detail expected results and outputs. Also involved in business continuity / disaster recovery testing.
• Reported the defects using Clearquest with analysis details so as to assist the developers to fix the defects faster.
• Performed database (RDBMS) validation using SQL and TOAD and also used MS Excel.
• Compared and analyzed the daily data feeds and managed the retirement of the older application which resulted in increased estimated earnings by around $275K/quarter.
• Developed the UAT test plans, test scenarios and test cases, mapped each requirement for effective test coverage and conducted User Acceptance Testing.
• Developed and maintained the Issue / Defect matrix and provided the status reports to the project team members during the defect resolution meetings.
• Actively participated in Release management and deployment processes including the Operational readiness testing and production testing.
• Prepared user training plans and provided end user training and presentations prior to the production dates and was involved in planning of deployment and post-deployment strategies.

Confidential, MA Jul ’06 - Nov‘07

Lead Business Analyst

There were two major projects:

A. Repo Sweep Automation

The first project was initiated to maintain, analyze and reconcile the Repo automation application and enhance the existing application with a new component featuring Reverse Repo automation and its applied calculation models.

B. Credit Risk Analysis & Basel II

The second project was based on Credit Risk and Basel II wherein the operational risk needed to be clearly distinguished from the credit risk and calculating each as per the BASEL II norms. The project was supported by the data warehouse & datamart architecture involving ETL process & business rules filters.

Role & Responsibilities:

• Interacted with SMEs to understand and gather requirements to improvise calculations of credit risk using the STA and IRB (Internal Rating Based Approach) and for calculations of operational risk using the STA, BIA as well as Advanced Measurement Approach.
• Understanding and gathering the requirements for various reports including regulatory reporting.
• Facilitated (JAD) Joint Application Development sessions to identify business rules and requirements and then documented them in a format that can be reviewed and understood by both business people and technical people.
• Provided primary liaison between business/operations/vendors and development.
• Elaborated the user requirements by developing prototypes, wireframes and screen mockups.
• Created business requirements specs. and converted them into functional/system specifications.
• Involved in developing business process models, process flows and DFDs.
• Created and maintained data mappings & data Dictionary and performed extensive data validations.
• Involved in developing and executing system and UAT test plans, test scenarios and test cases.
• Effectively interacted with developers and users for change requests, performed root cause analysis and impact analysis for issue resolutions/escalations.
• Extensively used SQL and MS excel functions for data retrieval, data comparisons and data validations.
• Involved in planning & training the users for generating various Crystal Reports for regulatory & other reporting.

Confidential, MA Mar‘05 – Jun ‘06

Business Analyst

Reference Data Integration Project

Worked on a data warehouse project that was initiated to integrate various vendor data for Fixed Income Securities (Bonds, CDs, and Mortgage Backed Securities- MBS). This Referential Data Integration (RDI) Project was initiated to provide timely and qualitative market data to the Risk calculation engine, Batch Processing and trading applications including the compliance & regulatory related applications. The back end was RDBMS database which was initialized and enriched through vendor data feeds.

Role & Responsibilities:

• Defined Project Scope, high-level business requirements, documented the constraints, assumptions & business impact. Identified project Risks & mitigations.
• Baselined the business requirements by conducting the requirement analysis meetings and translated them into functional requirements specifications.
• Developed the business process workflow, functional workflow diagrams and screen mock-ups for user reviews.
• Prepared and presented the budget estimation report with details of cost and resource allocations with effective timelines.
• Organized JAD sessions with business managers, application owners and developers. Designed the strategies to overcome potential obstinacy which could result from limited scope of the applications involved and its impact on the intertwined business processes workflows.
• Developed the parent-child data relationship models, ER modeling, database connections; defined data reports using RDL.
• Developed data flow diagrams and business process workflow diagrams and also developed file monitor screen designs to efficiently streamline and monitor the inbound & outbound data flows.
• Provided a thorough knowledge transfer of the project to the QA team prior to their test plan and test case preparations; discussed various positive and negative test scenarios; reviewed and approved test cases.
• Prepared UAT schedules and coordinated with Business users and technical teams to resolve issues during UAT and production parallel testing; performed end to end business level testing .

Confidential, NY Apr ‘04 – Feb ‘05

Business Analyst

Worked on multiple assignments with major contribution to a project which was to develop the application for calculating Credit Risk Exposure for FI Securities Trading system. The system calculates the pre-settlement risk and settlement risk for domestic fixed income, money market, secondary loan trading (Par and distressed loan), and commercial MBS.

Role & Responsibilities:

• Planned and conducted the requirements gathering sessions with the business team to collect the business reporting standards, security and service level requirements.
• Extracted, discussed, and refined business requirements during JAD sessions.
• Prepared business requirements document (BRD) and functional requirement document (FRD) by interacting with cross functional team members.
• Analyzed and tested various performance related reports for sector analysis, holding analysis and profile analysis.
• Identified, analyzed and documented business processes and prepared workflows, process diagrams and DFDs using UML.
• Involved in System testing (Functional testing and integration testing) and migrated all test cases and requirements to testdirector.
• Involved in developing the test plans and test cases for System testing and executing the same.
• Developed and Implemented Requirements Traceability Matrices, test case mapping to requirements, Project Status reports, Issue /defect matrices, UAT test plans and User Training documents.
• Conducted User Acceptance Testing (UAT) and developed the test plan, test conditions and test cases to be used in testing based on business requirements, technical specifications as well as product knowledge.
• Conducted user training sessions and actively participated in pre-deployment and production testing.

Education

• MBA Finance/Information Systems.
• BS in Accounting/Financial Management.