Meet the Weel Engineer: Sumit Chopra

Name: Sumit Chopra

Current Job Title: Lead Engineer

Favourite Book: Insanely Simple by Ken Segall

How long have you been working at Weel? 

I've been working at Weel for just over two years. 

What is your experience so far working at Weel as part of the founding team?  

When I joined Weel I was the fifth member of the team. Being a part of such a small team we were doing everything by ourselves, from the product to engineering and even customer support. We would split the customer support ourselves on a round-robin basis, which was actually a  great experience to work on different parts of the business and not just the engineering stuff. As a team, we have seen highs and lows and that has bonded us very well and it has been a lovely experience being part of a founding team and seeing it grow to the next level. 

What made you decide to work in Fintech? 

Before working with Weel I worked in India with a neo bank. At that time everything was going digital and so were payments, so, there was a huge push from everywhere including the government to help economies go cashless. Ultimately this big push for digital from the private and public sector made me hop on this fintech bus. 

You've worked on a number of projects and product releases. Which one or which ones have been your favourite and why?

During these two years I have worked on a lot of things but the first one that comes to my mind is one of my first projects at Weel. I had to solve an issue with card transactions because when we do card transactions we display those transactions to our customers in a transaction table. The table has a lot of detail in it including the name of the merchant and the amount of the transaction. When I joined, I noticed these merchant names were not names that you would recognize. I worked on cleaning these merchant names and making them clear and legible for users to understand.  This project involved understanding how Mastercard gets these names to us and what the different options we have to clean it up. To this day, my updates are still in the product and we continue to use that to clean our merchant names as they come from Mastercard. The best part is customers are really happy about it and I really loved working on the technology! 

What books are you reading right now?

I'm reading a book called Insanely Simple by a guy called Ken Segall who comes from a marketing background at Apple. The book is about the philosophy of Apple and the idea of keeping things insanely simple and I really love how Apple, not just in their products but in their day-to-day culture, try to keep things absolutely as simple as possible. 

Is there someone in Fintech or Tech generally that influences and inspires you and if so why?

Not specifically but in general I am a big fan of Steve Jobs. Going back to the principle of keeping things simple when they launched the iPhone it had just one button where competitor products were much more complex which I thought was really brave. I love the philosophy of Steve Jobs and the way he kept driving everybody in the company to keep things simple.

What advice can you give to people who would like to make a career switch to Fintech or are interested in learning more about Fintech?

The one thing I would say is to try to follow your passion. If it's solving problems in the fintech industry, definitely go for it but as we all know fintech is now very dynamic and there are a lot of moving parts. Ultimately if you want to move into fintech keep yourself abreast of new concepts that come into the space because it’s essential to be on top of the new things happening in the industry.