Managing your employee pension plan

Pension management and investment platform in one solution.

Industry

Fin-Tech

Location

United Kingdom

Overview

Smart Pension is a London based fin-tech company that helps other companies and individuals with investing and managing pension funds. They are a leader in this sector in the United Kingdom and are currently spreading its services to the US and other European countries.

Smart Pension helps with managing money invested in pension funds, educates their users through e-learning elements, and supports their clients in making smart and sound decisions for their future.

Q partnered up with Smart Pension to build a dedicated team that develops and supports the growth of their business. Q’s team is primarily responsible for development of the investment part of Smart Pension web application.

What we did

  • Web Platform
  • Quality Assurance

Tech stack

  • Ruby
  • JavaScript
  • QA

Process

  1. Workshop

    The process started with the workshop in Zagreb where our Head of Engineering and various team leads discussed the client’s setup, tech-stack and direction of the development.

    1

  2. Internal Candidate Preselection

    The next step was to find people that would lead their Ruby, JavaScript and QA team - the client interviewed more than 20 senior engineers and QA Experts from our team.

    2

  3. Setting up an Agile Team

    Three team leads were chosen one month after the initial workshop. Team leads spent 2 weeks on on-boarding in London, and returned to Croatia with the long-term vision for the team’s growth.

    3

  4. Team Expansion

    Currently, our team consists of 16 engineers and QA experts who have become an essential part of the Smart Pension team.

    4

  5. Further Development

    Currently, Q is scaling the team and plans to have 25+ team members working on Smart Pension products by the end of 2020.

    5

Challenges

Senior developers are hard to find and retain in London

We’ve established a process of finding and hiring exceptional talent and were able to scale up the initial team as the client expected.

Integration of the new team with the existing team in the United Kingdom

We spent 2 weeks in London to properly integrate with the London team and have a lot of experience in building augmented teams.

Security issues of handling sensitive financial data

We secured all the necessary equipment, including security lock and security camera for the Smart Pension team.

Requirements for rapid team growth

We have a large database of pre-scanned senior engineers and are in tight collaboration with Smart Pension and the local developer community. We are scaling the team based on the client’s requirements.

Conclusion

We established an initial dedicated team, covering Ruby, JavaScript and QA Automation.

To keep the quality on the highest level, we organize workshops with Smart Pension, both in London and Zagreb, once a month.

After our initial team integrated with the existing Smart Pension team, we continued to grow the team and support Smart Pension in their expanding toward the United States.

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