Consulting from Basel, Switzerland
Data integration, governance and interoperability for regulatory technology and healthcare — from business need to production, where correctness is not optional.
01 — The practice
Arfa Digital Consulting turns data problems in regulated settings into working systems. It combines software development, data analysis and strategic consulting, tuned for Swiss and European rules.
Behind it is Benjamin Arfa: nine years across regulatory technology, healthcare and Life Sciences manufacturing, including metadata modelling for the ECB and the Swiss FSO. Today he is Technical Manager at HL7 Switzerland and co-founder of BIRDBench Ltd.
Career journey
May 2026 —
Bringing innovation into RegTech.
Apr 2026 —
Driving healthcare data standardisation for FHIR-CH — implementation guidance, interoperability working groups, and Swiss healthcare data exchange standards.
Oct 2025 —
Requirements engineering for pharmaceutical and biotech data in Life Sciences manufacturing — system integration, lifecycle management, operational reporting across R&D and production.
Feb 2025 —
Leading software development and technical strategy for regulatory technology — open-source data infrastructure aligned with the BIRD standard.
2022 – 2024
Semantic data integration, FHIR data modelling, MDM frameworks. Contributing to HL7 Switzerland and the SNOMED French Translation Group.
2020 – 2022
Metadata modelling for banking supervision in the BIRD/SDD team, SDMX methodology, process automation, API integration for metadata repositories.
2017 – 2020
Machine learning research, exploratory data analysis, and data-driven applications across wind energy and industrial sectors.
It's Benni — a French-German-Arab soul, currently in Basel.
Music is my jam, software my bread and butter, and writing a way of expression that has kept me company since my fifth year of high school. I started with drawing, painting and calligraphy, then moved on to poetry. Nowadays I write prosody and dial in once in a while.
I like to comment on topics related to sovereignty, technology and solidarity.
I am a member of CMDA, the World Council of the Algerian Diaspora.
Shared infrastructure instead of licensed silos. Transparent rules instead of black boxes.
On building regulatory tooling in the open
02 — Services
Pillar 01
Scalable data applications and system integration. New builds, or modernising the systems you already run.
Pillar 02
Healthcare data that systems can exchange. Semantic integration and master data management, built on HL7 FHIR.
Pillar 03
Metadata and data architecture for statistical and supervisory reporting. Governance that holds across the whole data lifecycle.
Pillar 04
Business needs translated into technical requirements, then carried through to production operations. One person between business and technical teams, so nothing is lost in translation.
Project-based work with clear deliverables, or an ongoing advisory retainer.
Yes. I am based in Basel, work regularly with teams across Europe, and work remotely with international clients.
Both. Much of my work is modernising legacy data systems and bringing new standards into established infrastructure, from legacy HL7 v2 to existing reporting frameworks.
Privacy is designed in from the start: Swiss and EU data protection, GDPR, healthcare confidentiality and secure handling of regulatory data.
03 — Work
01
Co-founder · RegTech
Interoperable tools for regulatory reporting, in one workbench
BIRDBench brings together open and commercial extensions to the FreeBIRD application. Build a tool for the exact problem you have, and it works alongside the others.
02
Maintainer · GovTech
Swiss federal and cantonal law as a queryable dataset
34,443 acts from the Confederation and all 26 cantons, harmonised so they can be compared side by side. Published as open data, so software can test against the law and follow its changes.
03
Contributor · RegTech
Tooling to democratise BIRD as an open standard
An open-source toolkit for the Banks' Integrated Reporting Dictionary, the standard that defines the rules and templates European banks use to report to supervisors. It manages dictionaries and mappings, and validates and transforms BIRD models.
04 — Involvement
Technical Manager
Interoperability working groups and implementation guidance for FHIR-CH, the Swiss healthcare data exchange standards.
Head of Development
Open-source regulatory data infrastructure on the BIRD standard.
Co-Founder
Open, benchmark-driven approaches in the BIRD ecosystem.
Contributor
Contributing through Eclipse EFBT, the home of the FreeBIRD tools, under vendor-neutral governance.
Every engagement starts with a discovery call — and an honest answer about whether I am the right person for it.
How engagements begin
05 — Contact
Looking for guidance on data initiatives, system integration or interoperability? Briefs, half-formed ideas and cold introductions are all welcome.
Send a message · reply within 48h
Direct channels