Scaling Engineering for Open Banking at Wych

How a 13-person engineering function improved delivery cadence, quality and stakeholder confidence while delivering a regulated open banking integration ahead of schedule.

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Executive Summary

Wych was scaling its fintech SaaS platform during a period of increasing customer demand, organisational growth and regulatory change. The engineering function needed to meet immediate delivery commitments while developing the operational maturity required to support a growing platform and customer base.

As Head of Engineering, I led a 13-person cross-functional organisation spanning backend engineering, frontend engineering, quality assurance and customer experience. I introduced clearer operating rhythms, accountability structures, incident management practices and stakeholder engagement mechanisms while partnering with executive, product, compliance and customer stakeholders.

The engagement supported delivery of an open banking integration layer one month ahead of the relevant New Zealand compliance dates. It also contributed to lower operational costs, fewer defects, more frequent deployments and stronger client and stakeholder confidence.

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Client

Wych

Industry

Fintech • SaaS • Open Banking

My Role

Head of Engineering

Engagement

Engineering Leadership • Delivery Leadership • Platform Operations • Organisational Scaling

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The Challenge

Wych was evolving its open banking platform while supporting Kiwibank’s entry into New Zealand’s emerging open banking ecosystem.

The business needed to deliver against fixed regulatory milestones while improving the way engineering operated. Practices that had supported the organisation through its startup phase needed to evolve as platform scale, customer demand and regulatory scrutiny increased.

The engineering function required clearer ownership, stronger operational controls and greater visibility of priorities, delivery risks and customer commitments.

Symptoms included:

• Feature deployments occurring on a monthly cycle
• Operational meetings consuming significant engineering capacity
• Defects creating avoidable delivery and support friction
• Limited visibility of engineering priorities and delivery risks
• Inconsistent confidence in delivery predictability
• Startup-era practices becoming less effective as the organisation scaled

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Objectives

The engagement focused on:

• Delivering the open banking integration within the required regulatory timeframe
• Increasing the frequency and reliability of functional deployments
• Reducing operational cost and avoidable engineering overhead
• Improving quality, incident management and delivery discipline
• Strengthening stakeholder visibility and confidence in engineering execution

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My Approach

I approached the work as both a delivery challenge and an organisational scaling challenge.

The immediate priority was to ensure the integration and compliance milestones were met. At the same time, the engineering function needed clearer structures, stronger operating rhythms and better cross-functional alignment so that improvements could be sustained beyond a single delivery milestone.

For this engagement, I focused on:

1. Aligning product, engineering, customer experience, compliance and executive stakeholders around shared priorities
2. Introducing clearer planning, delivery and accountability rhythms
3. Improving visibility of engineering commitments, operational risks and platform priorities
4. Strengthening quality assurance, incident management and deployment practices
5. Balancing short-term regulatory delivery with longer-term platform and organisational readiness

This resulted in:

• Clearer ownership across engineering and operational work
• Improved visibility of progress, risks and delivery trade-offs
• More frequent and reliable feature deployments
• Stronger foundations for scaling the engineering organisation

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Activities Delivered

• Led a 13-person organisation across backend engineering, frontend engineering, quality assurance and customer experience
• Coordinated engineering and regulatory workstreams supporting the Kiwibank integration
• Introduced clearer planning, delivery and stakeholder engagement rhythms
• Established stronger accountability and engineering governance practices
• Improved incident management and operational risk visibility
• Partnered with engineers and technical leads on platform, API, security and operational architecture decisions

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Results

The engagement produced measurable improvements across delivery, quality, cost and stakeholder confidence.

Before	After
Feature deployments occurred monthly	Feature deployments moved to a weekly cadence
Defects created delivery and operational friction	Defects reduced by 30%
Operational meetings consumed significant engineering capacity	Operational meetings reduced by 50%, creating more development time
Delivery was constrained by a fixed regulatory deadline	The integration layer was delivered one month ahead of the relevant compliance dates
Stakeholders had limited confidence in delivery predictability	Reported client and stakeholder trust improved by 80% through monthly surveys

Additional outcomes included:

• A 20% reduction in operational costs
• A 75% improvement in functional deployment performance
• Improved visibility of delivery commitments, risks and priorities
• Greater organisational confidence in engineering execution

The greatest improvement was:

The shift from reactive, startup-style execution towards a more predictable engineering operating model. Clearer ownership, stronger delivery rhythms and improved stakeholder visibility enabled the team to meet a strategically important regulatory milestone while improving the underlying health of engineering operations.

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Lessons Learned

Several important themes emerged.

Predictability creates stakeholder confidence

Stakeholder trust improved when engineering priorities, commitments, risks and trade-offs became easier to understand. Confidence came from clearer communication and more consistent execution rather than from creating an unrealistic sense of certainty.

Delivery speed depends on the operating environment

Increasing deployment frequency required more than asking teams to work faster. It depended on reducing defects, removing unnecessary overhead and improving the practices surrounding quality, deployment and incident management.

Regulatory delivery and platform maturity must progress together

Focusing only on the compliance milestone would have produced a short-term result without addressing the operational constraints behind it. Combining milestone delivery with improvements to engineering practices created a stronger foundation for future platform growth.

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Reflection

This engagement reinforced my view that engineering effectiveness is a system-level outcome. Team capability matters, but it must be supported by clear decision-making, shared priorities, appropriate governance and operating practices suited to the organisation’s context.

Sustainable delivery improvement comes from changing the conditions around the work, not simply increasing pressure on the people doing it.

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Skills Demonstrated

• Engineering leadership
• Organisational scaling
• Product and engineering alignment
• Executive stakeholder engagement
• Delivery governance
• Incident and operational management
• Regulatory and customer alignment
• Platform strategy and technical decision-making

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Technologies

• Open banking APIs
• Fintech SaaS platforms
• Integration-layer services
• Backend and frontend engineering systems
• Deployment and incident-management tooling

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Key Takeaway

By combining engineering leadership with clearer governance, operational discipline and cross-functional alignment, Wych improved delivery performance while meeting a strategically important open banking milestone.