Andrew Smith - Community Author: Finextra Research

How blockchain can be used for improving security

Andrew Smith Founding CTO at RTGS & ClearBank

How blockchain can be used for improving security

At the heart of security within the financial services industry is the good old centralised Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). Every central bank, financial market infrastructure (FMI), payment system, Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) provider, embedded finance provider, even the way in which we all connect to secured websites goes through a centralised ...

21 March 2023 /payments

Andrew Smith Founding CTO at RTGS & ClearBank

Agile Series: Avoid management speak

One of my pet peeves, and I think a common source of hatred across most engineering teams, is using old cliché management terms that really do not apply. Or, worse still, they are fundamentally wrong within an agile environment. Engineering teams are full of uber smart individuals, and I don’t mean the people that cut code, no - I mean your stakeho...

16 March 2023 /people

Agile Series: SAS Rogue Heroes - the original agile team

Andrew Smith Founding CTO at RTGS & ClearBank

Agile Series: SAS Rogue Heroes - the original agile team

Currently airing on the BBC is a superb series that takes you through the origins of the SAS (Special Air Service). Though some of it has been made for our viewing, the vast majority of the storyline and characters is very much true. If you have not watched it, I highly recommend you look out for SAS Rogue Heroes. But how is this in any way shape ...

23 November 2022 /people

Andrew Smith Founding CTO at RTGS & ClearBank

Agile Series: Getting out of the way

As a leader in more than just technology, we must know when to get out of the way of our teams and colleagues. All too often, I see leaders who want to build high functioning teams and yet they micro-manage; impose far too many decision-making restrictions and place too much value in their own beliefs and experiences. The following tips will direc...

04 August 2022 /people

Andrew Smith Founding CTO at RTGS & ClearBank

Agile Series: Diversity of thought

Diversity is a big issue, one that challenges most organisations, and with ESG becoming increasingly important, it is becoming hard for regulated institutions to hide from their responsibilities. Now I personally don’t see it as a responsibility, I see diversity, and by that, I mean all aspects of diversity, as an opportunity to do things better, ...

30 March 2022 /people

Andrew Smith Founding CTO at RTGS & ClearBank

Agile Series: Building infrastructure

Recently I have been approached by a few people that agree with all my previous posts on agile, however, at the same time they question how it can work when it comes to building infrastructure. I get asked this because many will say, “surely at RTGS.global you're not following agile to build out the underlying infrastructure?” Now when I say infra...

29 September 2021 /devops

Andrew Smith Founding CTO at RTGS & ClearBank

Agile series: Evolved roadmaps

In my last post within this series, I looked at roadmaps and how to build them in an agile environment. In this post I will share with you more the type of roadmaps I like to build. Following on from my last post, I received lots of questions around “dates” and maintenance of the roadmap, and while there are many ways to “skin a cat” as they say, ...

08 July 2021 /devops

Andrew Smith Founding CTO at RTGS & ClearBank

Agile Series: Building roadmaps

The first, and probably most important thing to stress here is, you are building product roadmaps. The second thing to say is, do NOT build out product roadmaps at an executive level. All too often, product gets mixed in with strategy, as in, the executive think they are putting together strategy but rather they are talking products. To be frank, ...

14 May 2021 /devops

Agile Series: Including risk, compliance and internal audit

Andrew Smith Founding CTO at RTGS & ClearBank

Agile Series: Including risk, compliance and internal audit

This maybe the most 'controversial' article within this series, but it's potentially the one that could solve the most headaches, and for a COO/CIO/CTO maybe the one that removes the most stress, if risk, compliance, and internal audit are onboard. The truth across many functions within a financial institution is that they have not been exposed to ...

05 May 2021 /devops

Andrew Smith Founding CTO at RTGS & ClearBank

Agile Series: DevOps

In all of the articles that make up this “Agile Series”, a fair few of the same themes keep on flowing richly through each article. This one is no different…If you want your teams to be autonomous, if you want your teams to build self-contained products, if you want to be able to value delivery, then you need your teams to be able to deploy their ...

15 April 2021 /devops

Agile Series: Enabling agile with your software architecture

Andrew Smith Founding CTO at RTGS & ClearBank

Agile Series: Enabling agile with your software architecture

If you have the wrong software architecture, then your ability to really implement an agile engineering culture will be dramatically hampered. In previous posts, you will have noted that I outlined three core principles I like to instil within any engineering department. These principles being: Value delivery over predictability Value principles ...

31 March 2021 /devops

Andrew Smith Founding CTO at RTGS & ClearBank

Agile Series: Motivating Engineers

If you have spent most of your working life outside any form of IT department or engineering team, you probably won’t have come across many of the personalities that you find within those areas. I have been a software engineer since graduating from university and I can safely say that we are a unique bunch, more so when compared against a cross se...

18 March 2021 /devops

Long reads