The people behind the app: putting mobile banking in millions of hands

Technology is one of the fastest moving and most exciting parts of our business. We’re using technology to improve the way we do things across the bank. It’s helping us to be more efficient and effective in our systems and procedures, and above all, helping us to offer better services to our customers.

Research tells us that around 60% of our customers regularly use one of our digital services, such as online banking or our mobile phone app. And that figure now reflects sustained usage over a long period, whereas in previous years customer use rose and fell with events like Black Friday.

So, we’re focused on developing our digital services to reflect the growing needs of our customers. It’s important that we keep innovating, keep investing in the best resources, and invest in the best tech talent to join us.

We recently caught up with two members of our Mobile Technology team to hear more about their work, the way they do things, and why they do it.

Award-winning digital transformation

Daniel Morentin is a senior developer. When he had the chance to join us from another technology business, he was excited by the potential on offer. And he hasn’t been disappointed.

‘I thought it sounded amazing because I was now going to be operating, coding and providing features to a very large user base. When I joined the team about four years ago, I think we had around 5 or 6 million users, and now we have over 8 million. And that’s only ever going to get bigger.

‘And we’ve won awards! The industry has recognised what we’ve done here – the digital transformation project we’ve been working through is pretty amazing. The fact that we’re using things like Amazon Web Services is exciting.

‘Cloud computing has really changed from when I first started. And as a developer, I’m responsible for not just the code, but the infrastructure that the code runs on. So, when a customer is using the app on a busy day like Black Friday, they have absolutely no idea that in the back end of our app everything is scaling like crazy, because everyone is trying to jump onto Amazon to get whatever deals that they want. We’re able to provide that huge scale when required. But then when it’s not, we’re not wasting money on servers sitting in data centres, which would be really expensive and inefficient.’

Variety and collaboration

Software Engineer Vikraman Venkateswarlu has also been part of the Mobile Technology team for four years. He loves the variety he has in his role, and the collaboration with his colleagues and other teams.

‘For someone like me who’s passionate about technology and getting involved in modern tech, I think this job gives you a lot of opportunities to explore new things. Our mobile app has a whole host of different features, and each of them are so different, which also gives you an idea of the variety of work that we do. The work that I do for a particular agile release, or agile sprint, is not the same as what I do for the next one. There’s a lot of variety and such a wide exposure to new things that you get from the role. To be honest, I don’t think I’ve had this kind of exposure in my previous jobs. A lot of IT is about maintaining existing systems, whereas within mobile it’s about offering new features to customers and building new things.

‘As a team we collaborate with product designers and the product owner. We all share opinions about what’s needed, and it’s always useful to get other perspectives. And since we also do things in agile, at the end of a particular sprint we also collaborate as a whole team. We demonstrate the work we’ve done, and others pitch in with their ideas about where they think things could be done differently. It’s this collaborative effort that gives us the final output to what customers use and see.’

Always learning in a fast-paced environment

Vikraman takes full advantage of the opportunity for learning and development that comes with working in the Mobile Technology team.

‘The technology changes quite fast in this space. So, working on it is actually giving you experience to build upon your previous knowledge and learn something new as well. Besides that, we’re also encouraged to identify and attend training sessions if we think there’s a particular course that will be useful for us. It’s quite a large team, with people who’ve joined from different industries, with different product experiences. And we also work in development pairs, so I pair up with another person, and that rotates every few weeks. So, there’s a lot of knowledge that you can learn from the people you work with, depending on where they worked in the past.’

Daniel was also keen to highlight the impact of his work, and as far as he’s concerned, there’s very few technology jobs that can offer so much.

‘I think there are few opportunities of this scale. We’re working at such a big and exceptionally well-known brand, with modern technologies, on modern platforms, delivering on a huge scale to a massive customer base who are very demanding. I mean, that’s good, right? In this industry you want to be somewhere where you know that the features you develop will get used. And here, they’re going to be used by a lot of people.’