BANKIFI CASE STUDY

26/05/2023

BANKIFI x BRIGHTBOX: HELPING TURN A JUGGERNAUT

How do you transform an entire industry? You disrupt and help the juggernauts become nimble. Simple.

That’s the story that sits behind BankiFi, a disruptor in the truest sense of the word.

It’s a business created around a simple premise of supporting the small business community by helping banks both catch up and get ahead of the wave as a result of advances in technology and changes in regulation.

It’s a bold promise, but BankiFi is on a mission to help two million small businesses by 2024.

They are doing it by helping banks become and remain more relevant to small businesses, while at the same time protecting and proactively driving bank’s core business: lending.

Changing the rules of the game for the underbanked

Kirk Winstanley is Chief Operating Officer at BankiFi. His is a career that’s been spent supporting businesses to improve and grow. He’s part of a movement that is helping large incumbents  - often stifled by legacy infrastructure, technical debt and regulation  - to better serve their existing customer base and attract new businesses.

They’re doing this alongside providing a set of services above and beyond traditional banking products, things that will support the processes small businesses use to do their financial admin, implementing solutions that remove headaches and add real value.

With the rise of Open Banking-enabled accounting packages and innovative FinTechs, there’s a real danger to banks that lending opportunities go to these start-up organisations and not to them.

“Banks have underserved small business customers,” explained Kirk. “They either fell into the gap of not being a retail customer or not being a corporate customer. And the government realized three or four years ago that it's a massively underserved market, despite it being one of the fastest growing.”

The UK Government pushed the banks to serve those customers better. And that’s where BankiFi saw an opportunity.

He said: “We're a small business that understands the problems SMBs face. We are also bank technologists that understand banking, the problems and the threats banks face. It makes us uniquely positioned as a partner for banks to provide a best in class banking experience for their small business customers.”

We’re going to need a bigger team

True to its original goal, to help small business customers, the team initially developed its software to be deployed on premise by the bank, however, in a change its approach , BankiFi made the decision to develop its software as a service.

“The banks take the bank-grade service rather than a piece of software because it means they don't have to deploy it, they don't have to manage it or maintain it. It's a lot cheaper for us to do that, and it’s quicker and easier,” said Kirk.

“And with that software development - and also a challenge to embrace front-end dev - BankiFi needed to augment a team.”

In the last three years BankiFi has grown from 8-10 people in products and technology to 35. A steep growth curve that has tracked business success seeing more UK banking customers, a pilot in New Zealand, and their first US banking customer.

They are committed to building the heart of their business from the North of the UK, with teams in The United States, Australia and across Europe, to service the world’s SMBs.

And that’s where BrightBox plays a pivotal role.

Partnering for growth and partnering for culture

Product and technology make up three-quarters of BankiFi’s business, so reliance on good people is a must. That’s when it turned to nearshore as an option, working with BrightBox of one of a handful of strategic resourcing partners.

“We took a deliberate strategy, when we knew we were growing - and growing relatively quickly  - not to have a fully employed team. We could be agnostic of location, provided that people work in a UK time zone,” said Kirk.

“We wanted two or three key partnerships that would allow us to add people relatively quickly to our team. It meant if we needed to resize the team or repurpose the team, we could do that rapidly. If we'd have employed people in those roles, that would be really hard to manage.”

BankiFi took an approach to have its key leadership roles internal, one or two people as part of its employed team, and the rest via third parties.

And it’s the effort taken to understand BankiFi’s business by BrightBox that hasn’t gone unnoticed, laying the foundations for establishing the right cultural fit alongside skillset.

“We knew we needed a robust, stronger relationship than we’d previously had, something that would be more reliable. And BrightBox has the most consistent ability to provide the right people. These people are part of our team. It removes pain, additional costs and additional management.

“I’d say we've got a very distinct culture. And team fit is more important than skills and experience. BrightBox understand that. The people they put forward are always a really good team fit. And that's critical. We've interviewed people with third parties and directly that are technically brilliant , but we would never employ them, because the team fit wouldn't be right.”

How to make a real difference

At any given time, BankiFi tend to have 10+ BrightBox heads in the business, fluctuating alongside demand. The roles cover front-end and back-end development, infrastructure, quality assurance, with a particular emphasis on Scala – which is a rare skill. And BrightBox has always been able to find the resources that Kirk needs.

“They add real value – and that’s the most important thing. I've got a partner that I can trust. BrightBox will always try their very best to support and I always get the sense they are working really hard on our behalf.

“Key to that is how they understand our business. It means they provide the right people, with the right cultural fit, in a timely way. A combination of these factors, means we can see impact.”

It means there are savings in time when it comes to hiring. Something that could be double or triple if undertaken in-house. Everything from CV reviewing through to interviews.

Kirk explains: “What BrightBox did was take the time to get to know us and our roles. They talked to me, my head of delivery and other people in the organisation. And once they’d got one or two people on the ground, it became easier.”

And the real-world impact is there to see.

“BrightBox led the development of our own mobile app, now being used by real people in the real world. I think, the fact their people form such an integral part of our products and tech team, means that any result we get is as much down to BrightBox as it is down to us, our own products and tech people.”

And as BankiFi looks to take on the US and potentially create a team in Latam, BrightBox is seen as part of the journey.

“Whatever we achieve, they achieve with us. They’re part of that growth, part of that success.”