Dr Jack Cohen (Managing Director)

Dr Jack Cohen is the Managing Director of Synthesis Software Technologies (Pty) Ltd. Previously he was a Director of CQS Technology Holdings (Pty) Ltd. He holds BSc (Eng) Elec. and PhD degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand, where he lectured and conducted research into real-time distributed computer control systems. He is a senior member of the ACM, a senior member of the IEEE, and a member of the IET and SAIEE. He is also registered as a Professional Engineer with ECSA and as a Chartered Engineer with the Engineering Council in the UK. Before joining CQS, he worked as an independent consultant. He has extensive software engineering experience, having consulted to electricity and water supply utilities as well as companies in the telecommunications, industrial, financial services and healthcare sectors. His areas of interest include software reliability, software process management, software design methodologies, and the design and development of mission-critical, real-time and distributed software systems. Jack spends most of his time providing strategic input to companies that are faced with the challenges of integrating existing business processes and systems. Much of this work is centered on risk management, systems integration, software process management and technology evaluation. Jack is a pioneer in the area of Web Services, where his thought leadership led to the adoption of this technology by his clients as far back as 1999. He has more than twenty years experience in designing complex turn-key applications – ranging from custom financial administration, lending and securitization systems – to secure transactional systems for banking, payments, online services and treasury trading applications. He has also pioneered integration techniques that enable financial services providers to adapt their systems to meet ever-increasing compliance requirements including those relating to know-your-client (and common client identification), anti-money laundering, Basel and credit risk reporting.

Jake Shepherd (Director of Engineering and Technology)

Jake Shepherd is the Director of Engineering and Technology of Synthesis Software Technologies (Pty) Ltd. Previously he was a Director of CQS Technology Holdings (Pty) Ltd. He holds BSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand. Before joining Dr Jack Cohen as a founder of Synthesis Software Engineering, Jake was employed as software engineer at Hatch Africa, a large, multi-national project engineering company. He has extensive software engineering experience, having consulted to companies in the telecommunications, industrial and financial services sectors. His areas of focus include software design methodologies, software architecture, software design, and development of mission-critical, real-time and distributed software systems. Jake spends most of his time providing technical direction to members of the Synthesis team as well as being directly responsible for project deliverables. In addition Jake is responsible for the design and development of the core AORTA suite of Web Service-based applications that provide robust foundations for most of the Synthesis products and projects. Primarily as a result of the research and development of the AORTA product, Jake has gained an intimate, extensive knowledge of the various XML related standards (XML, XML Schemas, WSDL, WS-Security etc). In addition Jake has extensive experience across many different computer languages (C++, C#, Java, Delphi, VB6, Python), databases (MS SQL, Oracle, Sybase, MySQL) and has worked on various operating systems (Windows, Linux). Most importantly, Jake prides himself as being a passionate software engineer that relishes the opportunity to constantly learn and keep up to date with trends in the field of software engineering.

Michael Shapiro (Director of Business Development)

Michael obtained a BSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1995. He is currently in the final year of his Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree from the University of the Witwatersrand Business School. Michael has eleven years experience in the management of software projects and has vast experience in Internet-based technologies, bespoke software development, implementation of various COTS software applications, and software development methodologies. Michael joined CQS Technology Holdings in 2003 as Business Development Manager. Following the unbundling of the company and formation of Synthesis Software Technologies, he was appointed to the role of Director of Business Development. Prior to joining CQS he held the position of Accounts and Project Manager at Dimension Data (Internet Solutions), and thereafter was a Sales Manager for Miraculum. He has provided account and project management services in the software development field to large corporate clients such as Investec Bank Limited, Westfield Group (Australia), Absa Capital, Nedbank Capital, M-NET (Multichoice), Eskom, Liberty Life, South African Broadcast Corporation (SABC), Transnet, Development Bank SA and others. Michael has project management experience in business domains such as Anti-Money Laundering systems (AML), financial markets and exchange connectivity, payments technologies, information security implementations (including EMV2, PCI-DSS requirements and secure transactional web-site access), internet-based transactional applications, trade finance reporting systems and various regulatory risk reporting systems. He has an interest in how software and related technologies can improve efficiencies the financial services sector.