The pace of change in financial technology today is breathtaking.
While centuries may have passed between the minting of the first coins and the first credit card swipe, a momentous number of new technologies designed to execute transactions faster, easier and cheaper have occurred within just the past few decades.
For example, the introduction of portable credit card readers and payment apps now allow people to make and receive payments while they are walking down the street, riding on a bus or even brushing their teeth. At the same time, cryptocurrencies and blockchain payment technologies have helped shrink the settlement window for cross-border, cross-currency transactions from days or weeks to just seconds and at a fraction of the cost.
Chariot Solutions has been on the front lines of this change over the last 20 years, applying our expertise and know-how to help build and maintain innovative solutions for some of fintech’s most recognizable upstarts and stalwarts alike.
That breadth and depth of experience has afforded us a unique view into the key drivers of fintech innovation. During that span and across our client work, we’ve seen four areas of need consistently arise for fintech companies: achieving scale, ensuring business continuity, data management, and employee mentoring & training.
Consider fintech banking pioneer Moven. Chariot worked closely with their team to re-architect an initial proof of concept so it could scale to meet customer demand. We also tested a framework for code so they could confidently introduce new features and functionality without affecting the performance of future applications.
TD Canada Trust came calling Moven for a white label version, but a migration of millions of customers threatened to crash Moven’s system. Moven couldn’t afford one misstep, and turned to Chariot Solutions.
The key to meeting the dual needs of scale and continuity for Moven was our powerful combination of talent and expertise. Time and time again, we have proven Chariot’s ability to deploy the right people with the right skills at the right time for clients. In the case of Moven, that meant full stack engineers with a deep expertise in enterprise application architecture, including cloud, front-end and back-end development.
Similarly, our deep history in data engineering across multiple industries allowed us to help Bryllyant leverage existing client data to rapidly deploy new products and services. We quickly built a secure data pipeline for them that could access, fetch, validate, amend and store data for their customer facing applications and so they could serve up complementary product and service recommendations based on prior business transactions.
By remaining on the leading edge of our own training and development systems we can provide the best enterprise architecture and data specialists to build solutions, mentor staff on how to deploy and maintain them, and even build internal training programs so companies can continue to churn out knowledgeable IT staff.
A number of years ago, one of the world’s largest investment advisors approached us to help give their customers access and visibility portfolio performance and associated investment decision tools. After architecting that solution, they realized they needed help building out a full scale training and mentoring program on the system for employees. Chariot engineers then devised a customized mentoring program to provide the advisor’s technology leaders with critical instruction. We also created an ongoing training program for their current and future development teams tailored to their specific technologies and tools.
We are able to support such a wide and diverse range of needs because our people can come up to speed on new domains very quickly. Companies know our teams have a reputation for understanding both technology and business value, and that they do not need a lot of time and learning on their dime. As a mature resource, we already know where mistakes tend to happen and can help them avoid technical debt.
And importantly, rather than being focused only on the keyboard, Chariot teams understand resourcing, allowing them to fit either into a startup space where time and budgets are tight or operate efficiently within a sprawling enterprise organization. Regardless of the client, our teams serve as a strategic partner that can seamlessly integrate to increase the velocity of quality outputs quickly.
We like to say that Chariot is an experience model. We know what works, what to avoid and we always come through. Our ability to speak technology in application has helped the leaders in financial technology deliver on the promise of the future of finance while also staying one step ahead of the competition.