I build operational infrastructure for emerging-market businesses, shaped by banking, payments, POS, reconciliation, and regulated systems experience—including prior leadership as Lead Software Engineer at Dahabshil Bank International.
Former Lead Software Engineer · DBI
Before moving into national payment infrastructure, I served as Lead Software Engineer at Dahabshil Bank International. Working inside a regulated private-bank environment grounded my approach to transaction correctness, operational reliability, financial controls, and technical leadership.
That foundation connects the full arc of my work: private banking, national payment rails, government payment services, and payment-aware operating systems for businesses.
The national switch was the transaction engine. The wider operating environment still needed participant integration, settlement movement, liquidity intelligence, trusted messaging, reporting, reconciliation, and control.
I designed and built the supporting software ecosystem that connected those responsibilities into one usable platform.
The value was not any single service. It was the way the services worked together to create flow, visibility, control, and institutional independence.
Connect
Operate
Move
Govern
SIPS Connect gave each participant a secure, auditable integration layer—absorbing protocol complexity while protecting payment correctness.
TranslateCore Banking JSON to signed ISO 20022 payment, verification, status, return, and QR flows.
ProtectApply signature verification, certificate lookup, idempotency, duplicate protection, and return safety.
RecoverPersist transactions, handle timeouts, and use store-and-forward behavior when dependencies are unavailable.
ExplainPreserve an audit trail with health checks, metrics, logs, dashboards, and configuration APIs.
Each capability closed a real operating gap. Together, they turned raw switch activity into a platform that participants, operators, financial controllers, regulators, and leadership could use.
A secure participant-side gateway translating Core Banking interactions into controlled ISO 20022 payment flows.
Certificate discovery, caching, signing, and verification support for trusted participant messaging.
Near-real-time participant availability and BIC visibility for routing confidence and operations.
Balance, settlement-account, and debit-capacity monitoring with threshold and alert inputs.
Automated switch-to-RTGS/NSI file movement and settlement output preparation across systems.
A governed control suite productizing back-office configuration, accounting rules, service onboarding, fees, returns, validation, dry runs, and rollback.
Correlation and downstream delivery of fraud-management rejections and related transaction context.
A checkpointed pipeline transforming IPS transaction activity into reliable analytics, reconciliation, reporting, and operational intelligence.
Participant endpoint checks and availability signals that isolate network, switch, and participant issues.
A post-event intelligence layer spanning IPS transactions, participants, settlement, and fraud-event data.
Backend feeds for operations, regulators, executives, settlement, alerts, and compliance evidence.
Transaction summaries, reconciliation support, and operational evidence for network participants.
Matching support across switch, middleware, settlement, and participant records with reason tracking.
Curated transaction, liquidity, participant, fraud, and settlement signals for decision-makers.
Coverage across switch connectivity, components, liquidity, middleware, bridges, settlement, and APIs.
BO, accounting, fee, participant, return-processing, localization, and service-category changes.
Repeatable local delivery of capabilities that would otherwise depend on external change requests.
An invoice-first P2G gateway connecting government revenue workflows to SIPS Connect with controlled verification, payment confirmation, reversals, callbacks, and reconciliation.
Good infrastructure does more than process transactions. It changes how confidently an institution can operate, adapt, and make decisions.
Controlled participant integration and repeatable service configuration supported onboarding and production preparation.
Internal tools and extensions reduced reliance on external change requests for operational and service evolution.
Liquidity, endpoint health, transaction movement, fraud rejections, and settlement status became actionable signals.
Audit trails, retries, checkpoints, duplicate protection, reconciliation, and rollback made recovery deliberate.
Payment-aware enterprise operations
Forge Control is an SME operations platform designed for markets where business workflows, retail payments, settlement, reconciliation, and reporting need to converge.
Visit Forge ControlNational payment infrastructure experience revealed the next constraint: the rail can move value reliably while the SME at the edge still reconciles payments manually and runs operations through disconnected tools.
01 / Retail switch
Shared discipline
02 / Forge Control
Forge Control is designed to turn activity across these channels into structured collections, matched transactions, settlement awareness, accounting evidence, reporting, and operational action.
Forge Control helps SMEs turn payment activity into operational control.
Most SME software begins with invoices, inventory, CRM, or accounting and attaches payments later. Forge Control starts from a stronger premise: payment movement and business operations are parts of the same system.
It connects property, retail, invoicing, collections, and reporting workflows with payment discipline, reconciliation, settlement awareness, country-aware configuration, and market-local operating rules.
The moat is not a longer feature list. It is the ability to reason across the payment rail and the operating business as one system.
Deep experience across SME workflows, banking, POS, national payment infrastructure, and regulated operations.
Designed to work close to retail-payment and switch-adjacent data where access, partnerships, and market rules allow.
Payments, reconciliation, settlement awareness, workflows, and reporting are designed together rather than integrated late.
Built for mixed payment methods, fragmented POS, manual processes, localized rules, and multi-market expansion.
Abdulshakur Ahmed Aided is a software engineering leader with more than 10 years of experience in banking, payments, POS infrastructure, settlement, reconciliation, and regulated operations. Before his national payment infrastructure work, he served as Lead Software Engineer at Dahabshil Bank International. He is building Forge Control, a governed enterprise operations platform for SMEs across the Middle East and Africa, built from deep payment-infrastructure experience to connect business workflows with payment discipline, reconciliation, settlement awareness, reporting, and operational control.
I map the operating model, failure paths, people, data, and downstream obligations before narrowing into software.
Idempotency, recovery, auditability, rollback, and observability are design inputs—not work left for later.
I connect executive intent, operations reality, vendor constraints, financial controls, and implementation detail.
The strongest delivery improves the platform and the institution’s ability to change it safely after handover.
I work where payments, operations, regulation, product, and engineering have to become one executable system. The strongest fit is a mandate with real institutional stakes, unclear boundaries, and a need for both technical depth and decision leadership.
Participant integration, ISO 20022 orchestration, retail-switch extensions, trust services, and production-readiness design.
Transaction matching, settlement movement, accounting integrity, exception evidence, and operational control across systems.
Control layers that turn fragmented platform, participant, liquidity, fraud, and transaction data into operational action.
Emerging-market product and operating models that connect payment activity, workflows, reporting, and institutional capability.
The plain-language source of truth
Abdulshakur Ahmed Aided is a payment infrastructure engineer, SmartVista and national-switch specialist, strategic technology consultant, former Lead Software Engineer at Dahabshil Bank International, and Forge Control founder. His work connects regulated payment systems with the operational realities of businesses across the Middle East, Africa, and emerging markets.
I work with leaders and technical teams on high-stakes platforms, integration ecosystems, operating models, and the difficult space between product intent and production reality.
Discuss a mandateBased in Somalia · Available for selected mandates across the country, MEA, and remotely