Financial Services
Banking systems that pass both audit and peak load.
Core banking, payments, lending, and capital markets technology for institutions where a bad deployment is a regulatory event, not just an outage.
22
Institutions served
4M+
Daily transactions
99.99%
Payment availability
0
Regulatory findings
The pressure
What financial services teams are actually dealing with
Core systems nobody dares touch
Decades of accumulated logic in a platform whose original authors have retired, where the risk of change is high and the cost of stasis is higher.
Real-time expectations on batch architecture
Customers expect instant settlement and live balances from systems that were designed around an overnight cycle.
Regulatory surface that keeps expanding
Open banking, ISO 20022, sanctions screening, and reporting obligations each arrive with their own deadline and their own evidence requirements.
Fraud that adapts faster than the controls
Rules engines tuned two years ago against attack patterns that have since moved on, generating false positives while missing the real thing.
What we build
What we build for financial institutions
Systems designed for the two audiences that matter: the customer at peak load, and the regulator six months later.
Core banking modernisation
Incremental extraction of accounts, products, and ledger from a legacy core using strangler patterns, with parallel-run reconciliation throughout.
- Parallel-run validation
- Ledger reconciliation
- Progressive cutover
Payments & settlement
ISO 20022 messaging, real-time rails, and reconciliation engines built for idempotency and replay rather than best-effort delivery.
- ISO 20022 migration
- Idempotent processing
- Automated reconciliation
Lending & origination
Decisioning, document handling, and servicing workflows with the audit trail a credit committee and an examiner both need.
- Explainable decisioning
- Document automation
- Full audit trail
Risk & compliance
Sanctions screening, transaction monitoring, and regulatory reporting with evidence generated continuously instead of assembled before an inspection.
- Screening integration
- Continuous evidence
- Report automation
Capital markets platforms
Order management, position keeping, and post-trade processing where latency budgets and correctness are both non-negotiable.
- Deterministic processing
- Position reconciliation
- Latency budgets
Digital channels
Retail and corporate banking front ends with accessibility, performance, and strong customer authentication enforced in the pipeline.
- Strong authentication
- WCAG 2.2 AA
- Sub-second interactions
Compliance
The regulatory surface we build against
Controls are designed into the architecture and evidenced in the pipeline, so an audit is a report rather than a project.
Outcomes
What these engagements produced
Representative results from engagements in this sector.
- 01
Retail bank
Overnight batch reduced to a two-hour window
Re-architected the settlement pipeline around event streaming, cutting the close window by 78% and eliminating the morning delay in customer balances.
- 02
Payments provider
ISO 20022 migration with no customer-visible downtime
Dual-format processing during a nine-month transition, with automated reconciliation between the legacy and target message sets throughout.
- 03
Lender
Origination cycle cut from eleven days to four
Document automation and parallel decisioning removed three sequential handoffs, with a full explainability trail retained for each decision.
How we deliver here
Three things that make financial services delivery different
Change control
The release process is part of the architecture
Segregation of duties, evidenced approval and auditable deployment are not process overhead here — they constrain how the system can be built. A design that cannot be released under your change control is not a design, however elegant.
- Deployment pipeline evidenced for audit by construction
- Segregation of duties enforced in tooling, not by policy
- Every production change traceable to an approval
- Emergency change path defined and rehearsed
Correctness
Money systems reconcile or they are wrong
A ledger that is nearly right is broken. We build reconciliation in from the first increment, run it continuously rather than at close, and treat an unexplained variance as a release blocker rather than an operations task.
- Double-entry invariants enforced at the data layer
- Continuous reconciliation against the system of record
- Idempotent processing so replay is safe
- Variance alerting before the close window, not after
Availability
Cutovers without a maintenance window
Retail banking rarely has a window big enough for a real cutover. Parallel run with automated comparison is slower and considerably less exciting than a big-bang migration, which is exactly why we use it.
- Parallel run with automated output comparison
- Traffic shifted incrementally behind a flag
- Rollback executed in staging before the production window
- Opening balances signed off by finance before switchover
Modernisation options
Four routes off a legacy core, and what each really costs
The right answer depends far more on your change appetite and regulatory calendar than on the technology.
| Route | Typical duration | Risk profile | Best when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Encapsulate behind APIsLowest risk | 3–6 months | Low — core untouched | You need agility at the edge, not a new core |
| Progressive strangler | 18–36 months | Medium — continuous, reversible | The core must go but the bank cannot stop |
| Coexistence platform | 12–24 months | Medium — dual running cost | New products need a modern core, legacy keeps the back book |
| Full replacement | 3–5 years | High — single large cutover | Regulatory or vendor end-of-life forces the timeline |
Encapsulate behind APIs
Lowest risk- Typical duration
- 3–6 months
- Risk profile
- Low — core untouched
- Best when
- You need agility at the edge, not a new core
Progressive strangler
- Typical duration
- 18–36 months
- Risk profile
- Medium — continuous, reversible
- Best when
- The core must go but the bank cannot stop
Coexistence platform
- Typical duration
- 12–24 months
- Risk profile
- Medium — dual running cost
- Best when
- New products need a modern core, legacy keeps the back book
Full replacement
- Typical duration
- 3–5 years
- Risk profile
- High — single large cutover
- Best when
- Regulatory or vendor end-of-life forces the timeline
Questions
What financial services clients ask first
Usually about risk appetite and about who carries the regulatory exposure.
Risk and regulation
Can you work inside our change-control regime?
Yes, and we would be concerned by a supplier who offered to work around it. We map the change process during discovery and design the pipeline to produce your audit evidence automatically, so approval is a gate in the pipeline rather than a spreadsheet maintained alongside it.
Who is accountable to the regulator?
You are, and no supplier arrangement changes that. What we can do is make the evidence easy to produce: traceable approvals, immutable deployment records, and controls implemented as code so their operation can be demonstrated rather than asserted.
Do you have experience with a real core migration?
Yes, including a nine-month parallel run that took a retail bank off its legacy ledger with no maintenance window and brought the close from overnight to two hours. We will arrange a reference call with a comparable institution for engagements you are seriously evaluating.
Working in a different sector?
The engineering practice is the same across every vertical we serve. Browse the full list, or tell us what you are dealing with.
All industriesBring us the system you are most nervous about.
We will assess it against availability, regulatory exposure, and change risk — and tell you honestly whether it needs replacing.