Igmar Palsenberg
There’s little chance of getting bored here
After 15 years of working as an independent programmer and a few years as a back-end programmer and architect at a games development company, Igmar Palsenberg was keen to work in a more mature market, preferably within a larger organisation. He found new challenges at ING.
“The world of finance appealed to me, and a big, international company like ING offers tons of options in terms of departments and products you can work on. I joined in late 2018 as a Dev Engineer and was asked to become a Chapter Lead not long afterwards. I did that for a while, but I soon realised that I preferred to stay in pure engineering. Developing teams is not really my thing.”
Smooth-running payments
Today, Igmar works as a Payments Engine Engineer. He and his team are responsible for ensuring that Dutch Wholesale Banking customers’ European (SEPA) payments run smoothly. “We develop all kinds of new features for processing payments to and from these customers. Many of the feature developments are in response to new or amended international regulations. In addition, we receive improvement requests from the Customer Journey Experts, who are constantly working on creating the best possible experience for our customers.”
Endless possibilities
Igmar is happy he moved from a small, young company to the much bigger ING. “You have endless opportunities here. There are so many different departments, domains, products ... there’s not much chance of getting bored! We’re given the freedom to experiment, but there’s also the certainty of a solid and stable organisation. The world of finance really interests me, and ING’s use of IT is very pioneering. I’ve also learned a lot about that over the past two years.”
Sharing knowledge
On the topic of learning, Igmar enjoys sharing his own knowledge and experience with fellow engineers both inside and outside the bank. “It’s not only fun but also important to share knowledge. We have quite a lot of technical meet-ups within ING and I’ve held presentations at several of them. And I also regularly speak at external conferences, such as recently at J-Fall – the Netherlands’ biggest Java conference. I explained how my team rewrote part of the payments engine in Java. It was great fun to do – even though it was online this time, so very different from other years. In my opinion, we should never miss an opportunity to engage with the engineering community.”
About Igmar
After several years of technical and vocational education which culminated in a degree in computer science from HAN University of Applied Sciences, Igmar was his own boss for 15 years. Then in 2013 he joined Coolgames in Amsterdam where he worked initially as a back-end programmer and subsequently as an architect. He moved to ING in late 2018. Igmar has two children, and in his spare time he enjoys reading about technology and learning other languages. Most recently, he has started on Swedish.