This student wowed one of Canada’s largest pension funds with custom automation
Darhlilove Botchway has become an essential IT auditor at OPTrust, one of the largest pension funds in Canada, earning a rare 8-month extension on his co-op.
When Darhlilove Botchway arrived in wintery Toronto in 2025 from his home in Ghana, he felt like a fish out of water. The subfreezing temperatures shocked his system, which was accustomed to West Africa’s consistent heat. Canadian cuisine was also unfamiliar to him, he said.
“My taste buds did not really want to cope from the beginning,” he said, chuckling as he recalled his move to pursue an information systems master’s degree at Northeastern University in Toronto.
But just as he did after moving to North America, Botchway was quick to adapt and excel as a co-op at OPTrust, a prominent pension fund just a short walk from Northeastern Toronto’s downtown campus.
OPTrust, where Botchway is an IT auditor, is responsible for ensuring that about 118,000 workers employed by the Ontario government and other agencies receive retirement benefits.
Just as those public service employees rely on OPTrust to manage their earnings, the company leans on auditors like Botchway to ensure its operational security is airtight, he said. Botchway is tasked with identifying and mitigating security risks, creating processes and controls to shore up potential weak points in the company’s software infrastructure.
“Anything that goes wrong, especially with our critical business applications, could have a very devastating impact on our financial reporting at the end of the year, and that could really affect the organization,” Botchway said. “It really puts you in a position where, even as a developer, right from the onset, you begin to think about what could possibly go wrong: how could someone break into the system?”
Botchway said his role is important because of the high-stakes financial landscape OPTrust occupies. By the end of 2025, the company held more than $27 billion in net assets, earning it a coveted spot among the 10 largest pension funds in Canada, which are nicknamed the “Maple Revolutionaries.”
As he grew familiar with the role and its responsibilities, Botchway said he also took the initiative to think up other ways to optimize the company’s workflow. He drew from his previous automation experience at KPMG Ghana, a network of audit, tax and advisory firms, to streamline two particularly time-consuming processes at OPTrust.
For instance, Botchway constructed an automation tool that pings the person scheduled to host a daily meeting, shares details about the meeting’s contents and provides helpful links to resources they can use to plan their presentation. He also made a previously manual task obsolete by building an automated delivery service that sends a monthly report with status updates on ongoing tickets to OPTrust’s management team.
Botchway’s supervisor at OPTrust said that he consistently distinguished himself through “exceptional initiative, a proactive work ethic, and a strong problem-solving mindset,” according to Himadri Dave, a co-op adviser at Northeastern’s Toronto campus. “Rather than simply completing assigned tasks, Darhlilove regularly seeks out additional responsibilities, volunteers for new challenges, and looks for ways to improve processes for the benefit of the team,” the supervisor told Dave in a report during his co-op.
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Because of his exemplary work in risk mitigation and his forward-thinking implementation of automation to streamline various internal processes, OPTrust offered Botchway a rare eight-month extension of his co-op placement, which would have otherwise only been four months.
“I think the best feedback we have received from any employer has been for Darhlilove,” said Dave, who worked closely with Botchway on his professional development. “They were even asking us if there’s a way they could keep him forever and not let him go back to the university.”
As for Botchway, he found a way around the cold. He found an underground tunnel system that kept him warm on his route to campus and swiftly came to appreciate the city’s cultural diversity, he said.
Botchway also said his introduction to Toronto company culture and the ways in which teams with different responsibilities work together have been his greatest takeaways from Northeastern.
The auditing and risk mitigation skills gained through his co-op will carry him forward as he pursues a Certified Information Systems Auditor certification before his graduation in May 2027, he said.
“That’s something I’m really proud of because I know how difficult it is, especially in my position, to extend a contract,” Botchway said of his time with OPTrust. “For someone to have that level of confidence in you, I don’t take that lightly.”
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