FCA-licensed challenger bank, MVP to launch in 9 months

The client is a new market entrant setting up a fully FCA-licensed bank from a standing start, with a fixed regulatory launch date the whole business was built around. Investors, partners, and the regulator were all working to that milestone, so it could not move.

As a licensed bank, everything they shipped, from onboarding to payments, had to satisfy conduct and prudential requirements on day one. There was no soft launch to hide behind: the first customer interaction had to be compliant.

A licensed bank needs a great many regulated pieces working together at once, the mobile app, KYC and onboarding, core-banking integration, and payment rails, and they all had to be live and evidenced to a single hard date. Any one of them slipping put the launch at risk.

Building sequentially would never have hit the milestone, so the work had to run in parallel without the usual chaos that parallel delivery invites. Coordination was as much of a risk as the code.

And because it was a bank, the FCA required an evidence pack proving each control worked, not just a product that appeared to function. Compliance evidence had to be produced as the build progressed, not reconstructed afterwards.

A senior-only team, no juniors on the critical path, built the mobile app, KYC and onboarding, core-banking integration, and payment rails in parallel, with the same engineers who designed each control also accountable for its evidence.

We treated the regulatory evidence pack as a deliverable alongside the software, assembling it continuously so that compliance readiness tracked build progress rather than lagging it. Nothing was left to a scramble in the final weeks.

Work was sequenced against the launch date from the first sprint, with integration risk tackled early rather than deferred, so the hard date stayed credible throughout instead of becoming a cliff-edge at the end.