The Problem Solver: Paul Bari, Nordea

Paul Bari’s career has taken him across oceans and continents, but his true north has always been a fascination with mathematics. Now, he’s tackling not only the future of one of Northern Europe’s largest banks, but its employees, too

What if your hero told you that you were going to fail? For Paul Bari, group chief information officer and head of technology at one of Europe’s largest banks, it was a very real scenario. He recalls sitting in a lecture hall at the University of Queensland, Australia in 1996, having just started a bachelor’s degree in applied science in information technology. His professor was Terry Halpin, universally regarded as a giant in the field of relational databases and data modeling, and who had a way of making an entrance.

“‘Pretty much everyone in this class is going to fail,’” Bari recalls Halpin saying. “‘This is too difficult. I would suggest that you go and do programming.’”

It was a formative moment for Bari, who was in awe of Halpin’s academic research on conceptual modeling, and for his reputation as having learned his trade under Edgar F. Codd, the creator of relational databases. As he sat in an exam room, staring at a worksheet with a language he had never laid eyes on before, known as relational algebra, he resolved to prove him wrong. If he passed, he told himself, if Halpin’s theories weren’t correct this time, then he would pursue a career dedicated to data and databases.

That decision would set the template for his future, one that would eventually lead to his role running technology for Nordea, in its Copenhagen offices.

Bari says he has always had a personal interest in problem-solving—something that has been a constant throughout his career. At the age of seven, he remembers his father handing him a Commodore 64 computer to play with, something he describes as a novelty for kids in 1980s Australia. Growing up, this focus on problem-solving manifested itself as a preoccupation with math, resulting in him graduating from AB Paterson College, a private school, as one of the top-ranked students in Australia for math in 1995. He received automatic admission to his top college choice, the University of Queensland, where his affinity for equations, algebra, and mathematical solutions pushed him into the wider world of computer science, IT and data.

After graduating with a BA in applied science, with a major in computer science, he got his first job as a senior Oracle database administrator for Transport New South Wales. He remembers getting the role by “sheer luck” at the time and being assigned a project to help design an integrated transport database for the Sydney Olympics in 2000. The role involved learning about various forms of coding and geographical information systems, similar to a low-level version of Google Maps.

“I really enjoyed it because of the problem-solving part and I loved that it was tangible,” he says. “A lot of times in IT and what we do, you don’t get to see the tangible output and it can eat away at you in ways you don’t really realize over time, because you start getting further and further away from what really matters and the impact of things.”

A series of different roles followed. He remained at Transport New South Wales for over five years, then had a six-month stint as a consultant at a global gaming firm—a position he describes as being “morally uncomfortable”—and later worked as a treasury implementation consultant at Integrity Treasury Solutions, which was later acquired by SunGard. In 2005, he applied for a position at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), as an IT developer.

Bari was impressed by the people he met at the bank during the interview process, and much like the day he took Terry Halpin’s class for the first time, he resolved that he would work for the bank.

The only trouble was, they didn’t want him—at least, initially.

“I had never been rejected from a job before, and they immediately rejected me,” he recalls. “I remember doing the interview questions, and I think I got two out of 13 correct, from my memory. So, I called the recruiter, and they said that [CBA was] not interested. But I said, ‘I want to work here.’”

After a not-insignificant amount of back-and-forth between the two, the bank agreed to hire him as an enterprise IT developer on the basis that he would accept a 40 percent pay cut. Bari agreed, kick-starting his career in banking. They threw him in at the deep end. Soon after joining the bank, he was assigned what he describes as an impossibly high-profile task, in developing an in-house customer relationship system named CommSee.

The platform was designed to be able to determine the risk profile of clients for the issuance of loans, such as home loans. Multiple variables and permeations were built into the system to map out and assess client relationships using large quantities of data. Bari was responsible for writing the code that would enable it to function in real time.

“So, for six months, I literally locked myself away in that bank,” he explains. “I would code overnight to fix a challenge the bank had—to find a way to find all the relationships customers had with one another in real time. This was the precursor to what is called a client relationship.”

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