Andrew Smith - Community Author: Finextra Research

Agile Series: Applying your values and principles

Andrew Smith Founding CTO at RTGS & ClearBank

Agile Series: Applying your values and principles

In the previous article, we looked at underlying core values and setting principles to help create the right environment in which a good effective agile engineering culture can grow. In this article, we will look at how you can apply these to really build a great engineering culture. You need to coach a team Like many people I have long followed ...

05 March 2021 /devops

Agile Series: Agile values and principles

Andrew Smith Founding CTO at RTGS & ClearBank

Agile Series: Agile values and principles

When we talk 'agile' there are a few big issues that I notice, especially from management and the executive within financial institutions. These are preconceptions, thoughts of what agile is, what agile means based on previous IT project type experiences or from what they have picked up listening to podcasts, reading articles like this or what the...

19 February 2021 /devops

Agile Series: Decoupled, distributed domains

Andrew Smith Founding CTO at RTGS & ClearBank

Agile Series: Decoupled, distributed domains

This is my first article in a series of articles aimed at helping financial services executives understand software concepts, design principles and how these contribute (and even shape) agile principles. As a result, I hope these articles illustrate just how effective agile can be, helping shape and cultivate different cultural behaviours across a...

12 February 2021 /devops

Andrew Smith Founding CTO at RTGS & ClearBank

Time to understand identity

Identity has long been a hot topic, but more recently it has become red hot. There are so many discussions, debates, even large sections of events such as Sibos devoted to identity and more importantly, digital identity. However, the discussion is more often than not, a limiting view of digital identity. We end up 'boxed' into a specific implement...

25 November 2020 /identity

TARGET2 incident illustrates the need for High Availability and DevOps

Andrew Smith Founding CTO at RTGS & ClearBank

TARGET2 incident illustrates the need for High Availability and DevOps

The full story behind the recent TARGET2 outage is as yet not in the public domain, but from what we do know, the incident serves as a great use case for investment in DevOps and a move away from traditional Disaster Recovery type models. In a recent communication, the root cause of the incident was “found to be a software defect of a third-party ...

09 November 2020 /devops

Banking-as-a-Service: A disruptive force for good

Andrew Smith Founding CTO at RTGS & ClearBank

Banking-as-a-Service: A disruptive force for good

Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) comes in many various offerings, something that was not true back in 2014 when I first started talking about BaaS. Back then, I don’t believe anyone else was talking BaaS, let alone building propositions. However, fast forward a few years and BaaS is everywhere. It seems so many appearing un-related products and service...

02 March 2020 /wholesale

Andrew Smith Founding CTO at RTGS & ClearBank

The future of B2B payments

When looking to the future of something like B2B payments, it is best to focus on just one aspect and from that, you start to see a numerous other areas of change coming into focus. You don’t have to look to far ahead to identify one very clear trend and driver in the payment’s world, and that is an ever increasing drive towards real-time payments...

03 February 2020 /payments

Cloud native? Cloud ready? Cloud compatible? Cloud born? As an exec, what does this all mean?

Andrew Smith Founding CTO at RTGS & ClearBank

Cloud native? Cloud ready? Cloud compatible? Cloud born? As an exec, what does this all mean?

The financial services industry is slowly catching on to the many benefits of using the Cloud, well at least at a buzzword level. The issue for many technical leaders and executives however in financial services is making sense of the variations in how technology is described when alongside the word Cloud. Within Finextra alone, you can find articl...

20 January 2020 /cloud

Long reads