"Ultimately, technological evolution in the financial sector fails when we try to carry the past into the future."
On his career and professional transition
You spent 18 years at ADOPEM. What made you say "this is the moment" to go independent and found RSR Consulting?
Thank you, Belkis, for the invitation to your space — it is always a pleasure to connect and share with you.
My time at Banco ADOPEM, which was also my first job, profoundly shaped both my professional and personal path. I joined at a young age, eager to learn and grow, and had the privilege of working with mentors who consistently encouraged me to move forward. If I had to summarize that chapter in three words, they would be: learning, growth, and gratitude.
The transition into consulting was not a decision made overnight. Becoming an IT consultant requires years of preparation across many dimensions: academic, mental, emotional, and spiritual. It also means developing a clear roadmap for a personal project and recognizing when the right moment has arrived to take the leap into the next stage.
Family plays an enormously important role in a decision like this because, ultimately, it affects everyone. I am grateful to have a wife and children who understand that, and we approach these decisions as a family. My wife supports every new idea and every project, but she does more than offer encouragement — she actively participates in each of my initiatives.
Consulting also demands solid, accumulated experience. After nearly two decades leading projects, managing technology infrastructure, and directing teams, I now have the perspective and capabilities required to advise organizations and generate meaningful value for those that place their trust in our services.
What do you take from those years that you consider untransferable, and what have you had to unlearn to think like a consultant instead of an employee?
I'd say the technical-operational side. While being a good technician early on brought me great satisfaction, I understood early enough that evolving into a truly directive, strategic role meant learning to effectively delegate operational work and focus on the skills needed to lead initiatives, design architectures, and strategically size projects.
The real challenge is a process of operational unlearning: talking less about tactical components and shifting toward more holistic, strategic thinking, strictly aligned with business objectives and institutional value creation.
Beyond infrastructure and technology, what motivates you most about building this new stage as an independent consultant?
Beyond technology and infrastructure, what truly motivates me in this new stage is the transformative impact I can generate in organizations — reaching more institutions, generating structural change, and leading initiatives with real impact for the business and its clients. Over nearly two decades, I've seen firsthand how technology decisions aligned with critical business processes can shield an institution, strengthen its operational resilience, and open new paths for growth — even new business models.
Watching a well-executed strategy transform an institution's viability and trustworthiness is, without a doubt, the greatest driving force behind this project.
What's something most people don't know about you — something outside the professional realm that defines you as a person?
Outside the professional world, I consider myself someone with strong social sensitivity, an adventurous traveler, very family-oriented, affectionate — I love basketball and try to always play it. A lover of coffee and wine. I value good conversation. A friend to my friends!
Maybe something few people know is that I like to sing, I'm an amateur writer, and a music lover.
On infrastructure, cloud, and operational resilience
We saw there's an estimated 80% alignment between the European DORA framework and the Dominican Republic's RSCI regulation. What does that mean in practice for a bank in the region that's just beginning to prepare?
Yes. First, some context on what DORA is: it's a regulatory framework (Digital Operational Resilience Act) developed by the European Union to fundamentally shield the financial sector against disruptions of various kinds, including cyberattacks. In essence, aligning with DORA's core pillars prepares financial- sector organizations to face such events and ensures essential services stay operational regardless of the nature of the disruption. DORA establishes 5 pillars: ICT risk management, incident management, resilience testing, third-party risk management, and fostering a resilient culture.
As you mention, we carried out a thorough analysis and found that the Dominican Republic Central Bank's Cybersecurity and Information Security Regulation (RSCI) has about 80% alignment with DORA — and broadly speaking, this matters enormously, because adopting international frameworks translates into competitive advantage. For any bank in the region, aligning its business continuity models with this Digital Operational Resilience law can help it become a resilient entity with demonstrable recovery capabilities, strategic advantage, and elevated reputational standing with clients and regulators.
Ideally, this process should be driven by regulators and central banks themselves, moving toward a mandatory-adoption model — similar to the European scheme — as a maturity standard for the regional financial sector.
As a final recommendation, I propose that regional financial institutions build a strategic roadmap for progressively adopting the DORA framework.
What's the most common mistake you see in Latin American financial institutions when they try to migrate critical workloads to the cloud without compromising regulatory compliance?
In my experience, I've identified many mistakes, but the most common ones are:
- Trying to directly replicate on-premise architecture in the cloud. Whenever I get the chance to advise on this, my message is that migrating to the cloud requires a mindset shift (as we say in Dominican slang, "changing your chip"). In practice, I've seen significant time lost implementing the new architecture because teams try to do it the same way they built it on-premise — a major mistake. My recommendation: for cloud projects to be effective, we need to forget everything we know about on-premise architecture.
- Not including cybersecurity and developers in architecture design. From day zero, both the development team (for everything DevOps-related) and those responsible for cybersecurity (for the SecOps model) should be included, so the new architecture can align to the DevSecOps standard from an infrastructure standpoint. All teams — development, security, and infrastructure — need essential cloud architecture skills within their own areas of expertise.
- Treating regulatory compliance as a step that comes after implementation, rather than integrating it from the initial architecture (Compliance-by-Design).
Ultimately, technological evolution in the financial sector fails when we try to carry the past into the future. To mitigate risk and accelerate adoption, it's essential to unlearn on-premise models and build the cloud strategy from day zero on a DevSecOps culture — where development, infrastructure, and cybersecurity operate collaboratively and natively, and where the regulatory framework is integrated transversally.
With so much regulatory emphasis on business continuity and recovery plans (BCP/DRP), what separates an institution that's genuinely prepared from one that merely complies on paper?
In the Dominican Republic's banking sector, where the Superintendency of Banks, the Central Bank, and international regulations demand rigorous continuity standards, the difference between a genuinely resilient institution and one that only meets a documentation requirement comes down to operating culture, adaptability, and the evidence it can show regulators that its DRP and continuity plans are truly effective and, above all, tested. As with DORA, the goal is to ensure operations aren't interrupted and that we maintain that all-important customer experience.
In modern Dominican banking, true preparedness isn't measured by how polished the manuals presented to regulators are, but by the speed and resilience with which the institution protects depositors' funds, maintains market confidence, and ensures the stability of the national payments system in the face of a real crisis.
My final recommendation here is that not only the financial sector adopt these resilience frameworks, but that other sectors take these successful models and incorporate them into their own continuity and disaster recovery plans. Business continuity needs to evolve from a regulatory requirement or an individual competitive advantage into a cross-cutting policy of national security and development.
On his value proposition for technology leadership (CIO/CTO)
Many financial institutions, especially mid-sized ones, don't have the budget for a full-time CIO or CTO with this level of specialization. How does your nearly 19 years of experience translate into a fractional advisory service that actually moves the needle for those institutions?
I'm glad you brought this up. In the Dominican Republic — and I'd venture to say the rest of Latin America too — hiring these profiles usually requires large budgets given the specialized, strategic nature of the role. While large banking institutions can absorb these costs, it's the small and mid-sized companies that find the most value in our consulting model, since they engage services on a punctual, initiative-by- initiative basis.
Through project-based engagements, we get the internal team actively involved in the consulting process. An external advisor, like RSR Consulting, also sees the institution holistically and without bias, from a more strategic perspective aligned with industry best practices — which maximizes the impact of each initiative and creates mutual benefit for the whole organization.
When a CIO or CTO brings you in for strategic consulting, what's the first question you ask them, and what does their answer tell you about where the organization really stands?
The first question is almost always: "Which process or group of processes do you want to improve or optimize, and what strategic value do you expect from those improvements?"
That framing lets us precisely gauge the organization's operational maturity and identify the priority challenges we need to address for the initiative to succeed. In most cases, the answer immediately reveals whether they have strategic clarity or are just putting out operational fires — letting us make a quick preliminary diagnosis.
Where do you see RSR Consulting heading in the coming years, and what kind of institutions would you like to help most?
RSR Consulting has, since its inception, enjoyed significant acceptance, which I owe to friends — like you — who have been with us from day one and who have amplified what we're doing. I feel very happy about what's happening with me in this new stage of my professional career.
In the coming years, I see our firm becoming an important benchmark in technology business consulting — not just in the Dominican Republic, but across Latin America — with a primary focus on the financial sector, where we have the most experience after so many years, though we're also interested in exporting that knowledge to other sectors.
Additionally, within our service catalog, we intend to add a training and capacity-building vertical, which is so important for the personnel of the institutions we serve — strengthening teams' capabilities so they can properly follow through on the improvements we've implemented.
Thank you, Belkis