IT outsourcing
Adding reliable engineering capacity without loosening controls
A UK challenger bank needed more engineering capacity without weakening its controls. An outsourced team took on platform work, reliability and QA inside the existing guardrails.
Results at a glance
- 2.1x
- Deployment frequency
- -63%
- Mean time to recovery
- -45%
- Change failure rate
- +38 pts
- Test coverage
releases per week
92 to 34 minutes
The challenge
The bank was shipping new products faster than its platform team could support them. Release windows slipped, on-call was stretched thin and quality assurance became the bottleneck that everything queued behind. Hiring in-house was slow, and the bank was unwilling to trade its change and security controls for speed.
Reliability was the sharper worry. Incident volumes were creeping up, mean time to recovery was inconsistent and post-incident actions rarely closed. In a regulated bank a wobble in the platform is not just an engineering problem, so any added capacity had to work inside the same guardrails as the permanent team.
Pain points
- Release cadence slipped as platform work outpaced the in-house team
- Quality assurance was manual and became the release bottleneck
- Incident recovery times were inconsistent and follow-up actions stalled
- In-house hiring could not keep pace with product demand
Our approach
- Embedded a platform engineering pod that worked inside the bank's existing change management, code review and least-privilege access controls
- Built an automated test and continuous integration suite so quality assurance ran on every change rather than as a manual gate at the end
- Set up reliability practice with clear service level objectives, structured on-call and blameless post-incident reviews with tracked actions
- Kept all access least-privilege and audited, with segregation of duties so no single person could both build and release unchecked
Results at a glance
The results
- Deployment frequency roughly doubled as automated checks replaced the manual release gate.
- Mean time to recovery fell from 92 minutes to 34 minutes with structured on-call and clearer ownership.
- The change failure rate dropped as the automated suite caught regressions before they reached production.
We got the capacity we needed without bending a single control. The pod works the way our own team works, audit and all.
Common questions
The pod operates within the bank's existing change management, code review and least-privilege access. Segregation of duties is preserved, and every action is logged for audit.
These are representative engagements. Client identities are anonymised and the metrics are illustrative of the type of results this work delivers, not audited figures for a named client.
Tell us what you need to outsource
Share your requirement and model your savings. We reply within six hours with a clear next step.
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