About me

I'm Michele Durante, Team Lead Payments at RaiseNow, a payment processor and acquirer for fundraising and donation. I lead a frontend and a backend payment team there, and I'm based in Munich.

I have worked as a developer for more than ten years, nearly ten of them in payments: ATM transaction processing at Euronet in Munich, eCommerce websites and payment providers at Nowtel in London, and now payment processing and acquiring at RaiseNow. For eight of those years I have led teams. Along the way I have worked on PCI-DSS compliance and audits, and turned legacy systems into modular, tested ones with automated releases.

After ten years of building payment systems, I'm now studying the business behind them: how money is created, how schemes, acquirers and payment infrastructure fit together, and the regulation that shapes them, through CFTE's Payments in Digital Finance course. I want to work where engineering, product and the payments business meet, and to be as useful to compliance, partner and finance teams as I am to developers. This blog is where I write up what I learn (see Now learning).

My CV has the details. You can also find me on LinkedIn and GitHub.