Executive leadership · Portland
Marcus Lindqvist
Chief Technology Officer
“The best technology in a bank is the kind you never have to think about. If you noticed it, I've failed.”
Wrote his first banking code at 19 for a Swedish savings bank. Rebuilt Meridian's core systems without a single day of customer downtime.
- [email protected]
- Phone
- +1 (503) 555-0137
- Office
- Portland branch
- With Meridian since
- 2016
The story
Marcus grew up in Luleå, in the far north of Sweden, where winter is long and the internet was, in the 1990s, the most interesting thing happening. He taught himself to program on a secondhand Amiga and, at nineteen, got a summer job at Sparbanken Nord fixing the batch jobs that posted overnight interest. He has said that he has essentially been doing the same job, at increasing scale, ever since.
After a degree at KTH in Stockholm he spent eight years with Klarna during its early growth, then moved to Portland in 2013 when his wife, Elin, took a research position at OHSU. He consulted for Meridian Trust on a payments project, found he liked the people more than the project, and joined full-time in 2016.
His defining project was the 2022 core-banking migration. The old system dated from 1998 and the vendor was ending support. Marcus planned the cutover for eighteen months, ran it in parallel for four, and switched over on a Sunday night in October. Customers logged in Monday morning and noticed nothing, which he considers the highest possible compliment. The runbook ran to 340 pages; he keeps a copy on his shelf like a trophy.
He lives in Portland's Alberta Arts district with Elin and their twins, Freja and Nils, who are eight and already better at Minecraft than he is.
Off duty
When not at the bank
Cross-country skiing
He drives to Mount Hood's Teacup Lake trails every weekend from December to March and has completed the 50-kilometre Vasaloppet in Sweden twice. He calls it 'the only sport where the suffering is honest.'
Restoring vintage synthesizers
His basement holds a Roland Juno-60, a Yamaha DX7 and a half-rebuilt Moog Prodigy. He plays them badly and repairs them well, and will explain the difference at length.
Fika
He instituted a mandatory 3 p.m. coffee-and-cardamom-bun break for the technology team in 2017. Attendance is, in his words, 'voluntary but monitored.'
Ask me about
Education
- M.Sc. Computer Science, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, 2004
- Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), 2015
