Track Overview
Growing Unicorns in the EU: Building, Leading and Scaling Financial Tech Start Ups
The UK & EU FinTech sector continues to go from strength to strength. The start-ups are now scale-ups, and many of the scale-ups are unicorns. Banks that didn't exist a few years ago have millions of customers and thousands of employees, and they run tech they've designed and built from scratch. We'll explore the architectural and organisational challenges these pioneers are facing as they change up through the gears and alter the face of finance across the UK and the EU.
From this track
Scaling N26 Technology Through Hypergrowth
N26 is a mobile-first bank which was recently listed as the number one startup in Germany and one of the world's most valuable FinTechs. I joined the company 3 years ago, when it had less than 100 employees. Now there are over 1500 people working across 5 different locations. I will share my...
Folger Fonseca
Software Engineer and Tech Lead @N26
Modern Banking in 1500 Microservices
Monzo runs over 1,500 microservices in production and that number continues to grow. Each has a single responsibility and well defined interfaces. It takes many, many distinct pieces of functionality to run a modern banking backend. This talk will explain how we build, operate, observe and...
Matt Heath
Senior Staff Engineer @Monzo
Suhail Patel
Staff Engineer @Monzo
Rampant Pragmatism: Growth and Change at Starling Bank
Dan and Martin joined a tiny team at Starling Bank in early 2016 tasked with building a bank from scratch. In hindsight that was probably the easy bit. Today as engineering leads we aim to bring just enough structure to the organisation as it grows, while keeping alive that early spirit of...
Daniel Osborne
Web Technology Practice Lead @StarlingBank
Martin Dow
Engineering Lead for Core Banking @StarlingBank
Microservices for Growth at comparethemarket.com
comparethemarket.com have been running Kubernetes in production for over two years. But the journey has not always been straightforward. Most real stories of growth involve several generations of architecture, repeated accruals and repayments of technical debt, piling up of layers of technology...
Kenichi Shibata
Cloud Native Architect @comparethemkt
Adam Stewart
Solution Architect @comparethemkt
Applying Machine Learning to Financial Payments
This presentation discusses how Machine Learning can be applied to Payments to respond rapidly to known and emerging patterns of fraud, and to detect patterns of fraud that may not otherwise be identified. It will cover techniques that have been used and are emerging in fraud detection...
Tamsin Crossland
Senior Architect @iconsolutions
Speakers from this track
Folger Fonseca
Software Engineer and Tech Lead @N26
Folger is a Software Engineer and Tech Lead who has been working at N26 for the past 3 years. His main focus is mentoring team members, building backend microservices in cross-functional teams, designing systems, and engineering processes that perform at scale. In his free time, he enjoys...
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Matt Heath
Senior Staff Engineer @Monzo
Matt Heath is an engineer at Monzo, a new kind of digital bank, where he works on Monzo's microservice platform and payment services. Having previously worked as the Technical Lead of Hailo's global platform, Matt has an unhealthy obsession for scaling fault tolerant, high volume,...
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Suhail Patel
Staff Engineer @Monzo
Suhail is a Staff Engineer at Monzo focused on building the Core Platform. His role involves building and maintaining Monzo's infrastructure which spans nearly two thousand microservices and leverages key infrastructure components like Kubernetes, Cassandra, Etcd and more. He focuses...
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Daniel Osborne
Web Technology Practice Lead @StarlingBank
Dan has engineered medical, musical and financial software with Java, JavaScript and a light dusting of Clojure for 15 years.Since joining Starling in January 2016 he has delivered software, built and lead engineering teams and now leads the web technology practice. Most recently he has brought...
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Martin Dow
Engineering Lead for Core Banking @StarlingBank
Martin joined Starling Bank in early 2016, unable to resist the idea of building a bank from scratch. He has been navigating the far reaches of our young bank’s code base ever since and is now Engineering Lead for Core Banking. His kids believe in unicorns too.
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Kenichi Shibata
Cloud Native Architect @comparethemkt
Kenichi intially joined comparethemarket.com as an Application Architect, SME for Kubernetes laying out the roadmap for Kubernetes and Cloud Platform teams. Later on he moved into a Solution Architect role specializing in the Cloud. He has worked with big global companies like UNIQLO, Conde Nast,...
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Tamsin Crossland
Senior Architect @iconsolutions
Tamsin is a Senior Architect who is leading research on artificial intelligence for a FinTech payments specialist. Having started working on Expert Systems, Tamsin has 30 years experience of IT, primarily in the finance sector.
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Track Host
Greg Hawkins
Former Chief Technology Officer @starlingbank
Greg Hawkins is an independent consultant on tech, fintech, cloud and devops and advisor to banks in the UK and Australia. He was CTO of mobile challenger Starling Bank from 2016-2018, during which the fintech start-up acquired a banking licence and went from zero to smashing through the 100K...
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