About Analyst Engineering

Analyst Engineering is a practitioner site for technical analysts in banking and payments, written by an analyst with 10+ years of payments delivery experience. It publishes no-fluff playbooks on the work that actually ships: ISO 20022 and pacs.008 test cases, payments API integration, Kafka event validation, reading production logs, and tracing a payment across microservices. It is built for people already on a delivery team, not for beginners.

What is a technical analyst?

A technical analyst is one person who does five jobs. I do not just write requirements and hand them off. I analyze the problem, code enough to prove or build it, test it against real scenarios, and support it when it hits production. Business analyst, functional analyst, QA analyst, developer analyst, and systems analyst: on a delivery team, that is one person wearing five hats. The range is what sets the role apart, and it is the whole premise of this site.

What is my background?

I have spent 10+ years in banking and payments as a technical analyst. Most of that work has been payments delivery: ISO 20022 and SWIFT messaging, payments API integration, and the migrations and testing that keep money moving correctly. The articles here come from real delivery work, not theory: the pacs.008 test cases I have actually written, the Kafka flows I have validated, the production incidents I have traced through logs and databases.

Who runs this site?

Analyst Engineering is written and maintained by me, Ahmed Squalli. I also run Studio Squalli, the web studio in Montréal that designed and built this site: the Astro stack, the dark theme, and the structured data behind every page.

Who is this site for?

I built Analyst Engineering because almost everything written for analysts is aimed at beginners. There is very little for the practitioner who is already on a delivery team and wants to get sharper at the work that ships: writing test cases for a pacs.008 migration, validating a Kafka event flow, reading production logs, tracing a payment across microservices. If that is you, the articles and guides here are built for you.

What does Analyst Engineering cover?

The site is organized into five pillars, one for each hat the role wears. Each hub collects the articles for that discipline:

• Business analyst: requirements, scope, and stakeholder analysis that hold up in delivery.
• Functional analyst: turning vague intent into precise, testable behavior.
• QA analyst: test design, pacs.008 and ISO 20022 cases, API contract tests, and Kafka validation.
• Developer analyst: SQL, scripting, reading logs, and querying the database to understand the system.
• Systems analyst: tracing a transaction across microservices and mapping how the system really behaves.

New to the site? Start with the articles index to see the latest practitioner playbooks across all five pillars.