I'm CTO and co-founder of Togethrust, a French-regulated fintech (IFP, registered with ORIAS, ACPR-supervised) digitizing tontines and savings circles for African diaspora communities.
Togethrust, co-founder and CTO. One of three founders, based in Paris.
The tontine is the rotating savings circle that families and colleagues have run on WhatsApp threads and spreadsheets for generations. We make it a regulated product: members join a pool, contribute on a schedule, and receive the pot in turn, with identity verification, traced transfers, and loan contracts that hold up in front of a bank. Togethrust is registered with ORIAS as an Intermédiaire en Financement Participatif (n°24006639) and supervised by the Banque de France. We're incubated at HEC Paris, at Station F.
The regulation is what shapes the data model. A pool isn't a pot of money we hold. It's a set of bilateral loans between members, which is what the IFP registration requires and what makes the contracts enforceable. So every contribution and payout has to resolve into per-member positions, and those positions have to reconcile against settlement events that arrive late, out of order, or more than once. A discrepancy there isn't a display bug. It's a wrong answer to who owes whom, and that answer is a contract.
Fractional CTO for seed-to-Series A fintech and SaaS founders who need senior technical leadership without hiring for it full time. I embed with the team and make decisions rather than hand over a deck.
| Engagement | Length | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Fractional CTO | 3 to 6 months | Tech strategy, architecture decisions, hiring, team structure, regulatory guidance |
| Tech audit & coaching | 2 weeks to 3 months | Architecture review, DORA metrics, CI/CD, developer experience, tech debt roadmap |
| Tech due diligence | 2 to 3 weeks | Architecture, team and process review, scalability and risk assessment for VCs and M&A |
Recent results: cut delivery cycle time by 40% through CI/CD automation, reduced cloud spend by 35% via migration and rightsizing, and, leading four teams through a transition, cut operations tickets by 20% and technical debt by 30%. I've mentored 100+ developers.
Details and case studies at ksouf.com. To talk about an engagement, book a call.
First computer: an 8MHz Amstrad, 1992, in Tunisia's Saharan south. At 14 I won a live website-building duel on Tunisian national TV. Full story.
18+ years building banking systems at BNP Paribas, Société Générale, Crédit Agricole, and Desjardins, across France, Switzerland, Canada, the UAE, and Tunisia. Most of that time has gone into systems where being wrong is expensive: trading and back-office platforms, national infrastructure, and payments.
Domain-Driven Design, TDD, and event-driven architecture, held honest by trunk-based development and DORA metrics as the feedback loop. Claude Code automation is heavy and daily rather than experimental: compliance rules encoded as hooks, audit-before-act workflows. I still write code.
| Languages | TypeScript, Java |
| Backend | NestJS, MongoDB |
| Frontend | Next.js, React Native (Expo) |
| Platform | GCP (Cloud Run), Terraform, GitHub Actions |
| Observability | OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Sentry |
I co-founded SOCRATES Canada (2019) and Software Crafters Montréal (2019 to 2021), and co-organize Romandie Software Crafters in Switzerland (2021 to 2024).
- The challenges of Fractional CTOs, Tech Lead Corner #14 (French)
- Building Self-Sustaining Systems in Tech Organizations, Better Tech Leadership #90
- Track Down Dead Code and Delete It, Maintainable
- Interview micro-services, Les Cast Codeurs #235 (French)
- The Value of Creating Value, DevJourney #90
I ran a full-day workshop and gave a talk on naming at DDD Europe 2022, and spoke on microservices at Alpes Craft 2023. The full list is at ksouf.com/talks.html.
- fintech-architecture-patterns: payment orchestration, event-sourced compliance, multi-tenant banking, and audit trails, each with the anti-pattern I've watched teams ship instead.
- fintech-cto-checklist: pre-seed to Series A technical readiness, plus ADR and incident post-mortem templates. What I'd want on day one of a diligence.
- dddeu22-let-me-be-free-typescript: the codebase from my DDD Europe 2022 workshop. Hands-on Domain-Driven Design in TypeScript, modelling an interview-scheduling domain.
- presentations: conference decks on DDD, architecture, and technical leadership (archive, last updated 2022).
- Website: ksouf.com
- LinkedIn: khaled-souf-cto
- Togethrust: togethrust.com
- Email: khaled.souf@gmail.com
- Book a call: cal.com/khaled-souf-wthqet
For fractional CTO work, technical due diligence, or an architecture review, email me or book directly. I reply to specifics faster than to introductions.