Cornel Baloleanu

As a consultant in the New Business Development department at Telekom, I defined and implemented a new business model for the Romanian market: a partnership between a telco company and a bank under the Telekom brand. To accomplish this, I collaborated with the Telekom chief of staff to create and implement a digital banking strategy in the telco company with 7,000+ employees and a complex array of multiple systems to integrate. Besides this project, I was involved in other projects, such as bill payments, mPOS initiatives, or P2P payments.

I led a team of 5-10 program managers delivering complex telecom cross-functional projects for all Optiva customers. My team managed between 50-100 active projects across multiple Optiva products and different technologies, with an engineering cost of around $10 million per year. The program managers drove the engineering development efforts while working directly with engineering managers, engineers, the QA team, executive teams, external stakeholders, and third-party suppliers.

After taking over the team's management, I started implementing standard metrics to measure my team's productivity. I then started a process transformation that led to improvements of up to 10x in different business areas, such as cost per unit delivered. Jira usage was enforced, processes were automated, and automatic sheet reading from Jira was improved, leading to significant increases in team monitoring and productivity.

I created PayU's vision for the future and ensured it became a reality. Being focused on continuous innovation, I helped PayU migrate from a credit card processing company to a payment management company by launching the most comprehensive array of new products in the company's 10 years of history. By understanding the client's needs, focusing on customer satisfaction, and developing new features that attracted very big customers, I played a key role in the management team that doubled PayU's revenue in two years.