AI Platform Engineer · Fintech Operations

I fixed broken payment systems live at 2am.
Now I build AI that survives production.

At 2am a SWIFT MT103 batch failed with 4,112 records held. For years a human paged on-call, found the poison record, resubmitted the batch, and released settlement by morning with no loss and no sleep. The same job now runs as agents that isolate the record, resubmit, and settle while the human stays asleep.

ex-HSBCex-Société GénéraleMcGillMontreal
Watch an engagement run
Joseph Bankole 01 / About

From bank systems to AI platforms.

I am an AI platform engineer at a global bank in Montreal, supporting enterprise deployments of Claude, ChatGPT, Grok and Copilot. I came to it after ten years keeping bank systems running, the last five in payments.

I studied electrical engineering at McGill and planned on control systems, but found myself at HSBC on market risk systems instead. I spent nearly five years in Toronto supporting the platforms that run value-at-risk and Monte Carlo simulations, in a follow-the-sun team across four countries. At Société Générale in Montreal I moved to payments. I supported the SWIFT, Montran, ACH and Flexcube applications, which handle thousands of transactions a day worth millions of dollars, in a regulated correspondent bank. I led testing and deployment of the ISO 20022 MX migration across more than five business units, and it went live with zero rollbacks.

Across the two banks I shipped 134 permanent root-cause fixes and mentored five analysts. Outside the bank I run The ARCHV, a football history brand built on a production system I designed myself: over 120 Claude skills, scheduled agents for research and editing, and a native iOS app. Same discipline, different system.

I grew up in Lagos, moved to New Hampshire at nine, and came to Canada for McGill. My partner and I run our household on an app I wrote for us, and outside work I make music in Ableton Live and engineer the audio for a friend's podcast, Pros in the Arena.

I write down what I learn in the field notes, for anyone moving into this work and for anyone who wants to be happier in the job they already have. For one sourced AI story most days, follow along on Threads.

02 / The delivery

Watch an engagement run.

Scope to Run, the way I actually ship. Scroll through it, or drag the timeline.

01

Scope

one problem, named

founder decides, agents build

02

Build

The ARCHV iOS app, build 40

agent fleets, every diff reviewed

03

Verify

238 tests, none failed

fresh-install UI gates

review caught shipping bugs in 4 of 6 builds

05

Run

a desk that publishes every morning

health probes that email before users notice

Drag, or use arrow keys
03 / Projects

Things I have shipped.

Two live products, both built and run end to end. One tells football's story with an iOS app live on the App Store, and one explains AI news in plain English.

The ARCHV crest logo

The ARCHV

Football history, illustrated · @thearchvfc

An immersive archive of football's greatest moments, retold across social and in an iOS app that is live on the App Store. The owned site, thearchv.ca, covers football, NFL, F1, tennis, golf and basketball in illustrated form, with long reads on the systems that run the game. The whole content operation behind it runs as a fleet of scheduled AI agents: generation, scheduling, analytics, and a performance log that breeds towards what works.

ARCHV AI logo

ARCHV AI

AI news in plain English · @thearchv.ai

A Threads account that posts one recent AI story most days, in plain English and with its sources named. It runs on a scheduled agent that pulls the latest real stories, writes each post to a fixed brief, and checks every one against hard rules on sourcing and voice before it ships. No invented numbers, no hype.

04 / How I scope a build

How I scope a build.

This is how I size a two-week build. Answer three questions and the sketch fills in, honest about what fits in a fortnight.

1 What runs your ops today?
2 What eats the most hours?
3 How would you want it delivered?
06 / News

The brief on agentic commerce.

A running digest of payments, agentic commerce, and the AI stories that touch how money will move. Sourced, edited, and written plainly.

Wix gave its Symphony agents a Stripe wallet and the owner ten minutes to say yesWix connected its Symphony agents to Stripe’s Link wallet on 15 October 2026, and the owner approves each purchase by WhatsApp or SMS inside ten minutes. Chainalysis counts 138 million x402 payments on Base, and Stripe’s John Collison says its agentic commerce went vertical in September. → The FSB told the G20 that stablecoin rules have never met a crisis, and Grok Bot’s terms put agent purchases on the shopperThe Financial Stability Board told the G20 on 12 October 2026 that stablecoins and national rules are untested in severe stress, and named reserves split between affiliated issuers as a risk. Grok Bot’s terms put agent purchases on the shopper, Sierra published its Poppy draft and Meta released Muse Wonder. → Crossmint gave AI agents a way to buy from stores that never signed up, and Riskified started asking who sent themCrossmint launched a toolkit on 8 October 2026 that lets AI agents pay at online stores, including ones that never added agent support. Riskified announced identity checks for the person behind an agent, Newegg opened checkout inside Gemini, and ESMA told EU crypto firms to drop unauthorised stablecoins. → Open USD went live through Stripe, Visa and Mastercard, and DoorDash let a text message do the checkoutOpen USD, a dollar stablecoin backed by Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa, went live on 30 September 2026, issued by Stripe’s Bridge. DoorDash showed Text DoorDash, an AI agent that orders and checks out inside a text thread. Treasury published its rule for reviewing state stablecoin regimes the same day. → Shopify handed browser agents the checkout, and Google put a Flipkart buy button inside GeminiShopify gave browser AI agents WebMCP checkout tools on 28 September 2026, with the order placed only after the buyer confirms. Google is testing a Flipkart buy button in Gemini and AI Mode in India. The Federal Reserve Board opened two GENIUS Act stablecoin proposals for comment on 24 September. → Six banks wrote down what shoppers fear about AI agents, and PayPal signed up to Muse within a dayNatWest, Bank of America, Capital One, ING, Commonwealth Bank of Australia and ASB published five non-binding principles for agentic commerce on 22 September 2026. PayPal said it will support Meta’s Muse agent at checkout, with no launch date. Amazon put its Seller Assistant agent inside Anthropic’s Claude in beta on 23 September. →

See the full digest →