Mehmet Zahit Ates

- Leading all technology functions with oversight of a 370-person team, ensuring strategic alignment, operational excellence, and innovation across the Bank’s IT landscape. - Spearheaded the Bank’s first artificial intelligence initiatives. - Led the migration from IBM Mainframe to a modern, agile architecture, unlocking lower costs, faster development, and greater innovation through open-source technologies.

- Oversee the entirety of technological operations within the Ministry, leading a team of 91 professionals. - Led and ensured the punctual completion of key software initiatives: the Investment Loan project, the Green Industry project and the digital transformation project. - Spearheaded the planning and implementation of a disaster recovery site.

- Promoted to CIO responsible for overseeing all technology functions, staff of 315. - Orchestrated 100+ technical staff for the on-time delivery of the instant payment system “FAST” that enables interbank fund transfers in< 1 second, averaging 5M daily transactions. - Led the design and implementation of a 4-year plan to transform/migrate from a monolith to a microservice, cloud-native architecture, resulting in 52% conversion in 2 years. - Initiated re-designing and re-implementing of Electronic Fund Transfer (EFT) and Electronic Securities Transfer System (ESTS) so that Turkey’s critical payment systems can work in multiple locations to increase resilience and can communicate with other countries' payment systems with a standard data format (ISO 20022) to increase economic cooperation and make them universally accessible. - Strengthened partnerships with 16 business units and delivered a technical roadmap in four key areas: digitalizing business processes, transforming the IT infrastructure, increasing cybersecurity resilience, and optimizing investments. - Spearheaded a supervisory technology (SupTech) system for a “high-frequency data” streaming pipeline that delivered two months ahead of the initial plan of 8 months that instantly collects economic data (e.g., FX transactions) from 52 banks and provided near real-time dashboards for decision-makers. - Streamlined IT monitoring management system of services and production servers, improving cross-functional collaboration, issue detection/resolution time, and overall system uptime. - Led the designing and building of a new disaster recovery center in Istanbul. - Managed to establish on-time delivery of the IT infrastructure of the new office in Istanbul and the migration of 500+ people. - Optimized OPEX/CAPEX budgets and decreased IT operating costs (i.e., telecom savings of 25%) by renegotiating and revising existing contracts.

- Promoted to the deputy CIO and managed 108 staff including project managers, developers, and business analysts. - Led the application migration initiative (from Natural to Java) that saved ~USD 0.4M per annum.

- Led 2-3 staff audit teams to perform audits related to all lifecycle aspects of the information systems within CBRT using industry best practices (COBIT, ITIL, NIST, ISO 27001, ISO 22301, and ISO 31000). - Provided cybersecurity and risk assessment consulting for Turkey’s new in-house RTGS payment system with a daily average of USD 42B from 4M transactions by 2021. - Served as a consultant to the Information Society Strategy Renewal Project on the topic, “Internet Entrepreneurship & E-Commerce,” which aims to provide outputs that will constitute the basis of the new information society structure of the Turkish Republic to achieve an increase in annual Turkish exports to $500 billion by the end of 2023, as organized by the Ministry of Development of the Republic of Turkey. - Represented CBRT in global meetings held by The Center of Excellence in Finance in Slovenia, The Reserve Bank of India, The National Bank of Poland, Deutsche Bundesbank, and The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. - Contributed as either an invited attendee or guest speaker to Google Big Tent (Ankara, 2013), IT Audit Workshop at The Ministry of Finance (Ankara, 2013), E-Trade in Turkey Conference held by the Ministry of Customs and Trade (Ankara, 2013), IT Governance and Audit Conference (Ankara, 2011), Leveraging the Role of Internal Audit in Central Banks Conference (2008, Istanbul). - Acquired globally recognized certifications in audit, control, and security of IT such as CISA, CISM, and CEH.

- Oversaw all internal audit and risk management functions of BKM, the entity responsible for the clearing & settlement of all domestic credit, debit, and prepaid transactions (232M cards, totaling $6.7B as of November 2021) within Turkey.

- Supported the "L-3 SmartDeck" Project, a joint venture project with L3Harris Avionics Systems, USA. - Designed and developed test cases for the graphics library of the flight cockpit system.

- Designed and developed video recorder software for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV).

- Supported the "L-3 SmartDeck" Project, a joint venture project with L3Harris Avionics Systems, USA. - Designed and developed test cases for the graphics library of the flight cockpit system.

Competing in the Age of AI

Concentration in Corporate Finance

Information Technology Law Project: The Future of Net Neutrality in Turkey

Project: Metadata Video Player

Project: Outdoor and GPS Based Location Services in Bilkent