Fintech · Technology
A dedicated offshore engineering team for a UK digital banking startup
A UK fintech startup needed more engineers on its digital banking app without hiring a full in house team or loosening its GDPR and PCI DSS controls. We embedded a pod of backend, frontend, DevOps and security engineers in their sprints, and the pod supported the app through rapid user growth.
3xFaster release cycles once the pod joined5M+Active users supported as the app grew50%Lower cost than building the same team in house- Client
- A UK based fintech startup running a digital banking app
- Region
- UK and Europe
- Sponsor
- CTO and head of product
- Duration
- Pod productive in the client's codebase within 4 weeks, then a rolling monthly plan with round the clock support
Engagement model
FDE: Forward Deployed Engineering
Our engineers joined the client's own sprints, stand ups and on call rota in UK hours, worked in their repositories and answered directly to their CTO.
How FDE worksThe team
- Engagement lead1
- Backend engineer3
- Frontend engineer2
- DevOps engineer1
- Security engineer1
- QA engineer (shared)1
The challenge
Where things stood
- The in house engineering team was small, and new features for the banking app sat in the backlog for months.
- Every change touching payments or customer data had to stay within GDPR and PCI DSS, so speed could not come at the cost of controls.
- User numbers were climbing faster than the infrastructure had been planned for, and peak hours exposed slow services.
- Customers were spread across time zones, which meant the app needed monitoring and support at any hour.
The approach
How we ran it
Weeks 1 to 4
Onboarding into the client's team
We read the codebase, shadowed the existing engineers and took small tickets first. Access was set up through the client's own identity provider so every action was logged on their side.
Weeks 3 to 8
Delivery pipeline and security baseline
We set up CI/CD with automated tests and security scans on every pull request, added multi factor authentication for customer and staff logins, and encrypted sensitive fields in transit and at rest.
Weeks 6 to 16
Scaling the platform
We moved the busiest services to containers on Kubernetes with autoscaling, added caching for balance and transaction lookups, and load tested ahead of each marketing push.
Ongoing
Run and support
The pod took a share of the on call rota, with alerting, runbooks and a weekly review of incidents and near misses with the client's CTO.
What it looks like
Representative screens
Drawn to show the kind of system we delivered. Client screens and data stay private.
Sprint 42 board
To do2
- Card freeze from app settings
- Rate limit on OTP resend
In progress2
- Standing order edit flow
- Ledger service cache warm up
In review1
- PCI scope check on new payee API
Done3
- MFA for back office logins
- Statement PDF export
- Autoscaling on payments service
Platform health, last 24 hours
API p95 latency
182 ms
Error rate
0.04%
Deploys today
6
Open P1 incidents
0
- Payments64
- Accounts48
- Cards41
- Onboarding27
- Notifications22
What we delivered
Modules and features
- CI/CD pipeline with automated test, dependency and container scanning on every merge
- Multi factor authentication for customers and back office staff
- Field level encryption for card and identity data
- Containerised services on Kubernetes with autoscaling for peak hours
- Monitoring, alerting and runbooks for round the clock support
- New app features shipped from the client's backlog every sprint
What changed
Outcomes
- 3xFaster release cycles once the pod joined
- 5M+Active users supported as the app grew
- 50%Lower cost than building the same team in house
- Encryption and multi factor authentication in place across the app
Figures as reported by the client.
Their expertise in security, scalability and agile execution has been invaluable.
Solutions
- Customer portalsCustomer and Partner Self-Service Portals
- GRC and complianceGovernance, Risk and Compliance Management
Industry and platforms
Looking back
Starting with small tickets in the client's own repositories built trust quickly and kept the CTO in control of priorities. What we would change is the on call handover: in the first two months it relied on a shared chat channel, and some overnight alerts were picked up late. A written handover note at the end of each shift, which we added later, should have been there from week one.
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