Case Study - How this fintech became Plandek’s highest performer across key engineering benchmarks

The Challenge

A pioneering neo-bank has revolutionized the financial services landscape through its innovative all-in-one, end-to-end digital approach. They offer the most advanced digital banking and payments solutions across consumers and enterprise segments in their country via a top-rated finance app and leading merchant acquirer and payments processing business. They are currently the number 1 digital banking app in their country in terms of monthly users.

Head of Engineering

Unnamed international fintech

"We are building the most comprehensive financial services ecosystem in the country, empowering consumers and enterprises to thrive in the digital economy. We are redefining how banking is done here."

In this case study, we will cover why and how the fintech employed Plandek to drive their software delivery, using SDLC metrics to track and monitor progress for continuous improvement. We’ll explore how they were able to see vast improvements across their teams shortly after implementing Plandek. The results below include:

1. Lead Time decreased up to 78%
2. Cycle Time decreased up to 76%
3. Bug resolution time down by 93%
4. Estimation accuracy increase of up to 27%

The Scope

The fintech previously built their own internal development platform (IDP) which is still in operation today; they use this to track key performance indicators (KPIs) with their teams. As this is their tool, they benefit from the freedom of defining their own metrics and what constitutes ‘success’.

So why do they need Plandek?

The fintech’s IDP is self-service – they require their teams to update and maintain their data, and they have an acting PMO to oversee the project. When they first started to explore Plandek and our product offering during the pilot phase, they outlined how their IDP meets the purpose of reporting on the current state of play, but it doesn’t provide actionable insight. To elaborate, they can see how they’re performing but not how to improve, this is where Plandek comes in.

During the pilot phase, the fintechs success criteria contained the ability for Plandek to lay agnostically on top of the client’s workflow without disrupting their teams. In addition, the client also wanted to be able to build the metrics they already had within their IDP to test Plandeks data validity i.e. do / can our metrics align with theirs?

The validation exercise was a success, and they were happy with Plandek’s proof of concept. They then wanted to see what value Plandek could add beyond their IDP metrics…

The Outcome

Introducing Plandek has been instrumental to the fintech’s needs to increase visibility and enable teams to  understand the levers to pull to improve productivity. Their previous reports for their IDP provided a static viewpoint of how they performed within a given time period, it was somewhat of a box-ticking exercise for senior stakeholders. This meant the teams didn’t gain any guided direction from the reports in terms of how or where to improve.

Head of Engineering

Unnamed international fintech

"Plandek has been instrumental in helping us understand the key metrics that drive productivity, while providing teams with the autonomy they need to tackle their day to day challenges. It has become a critical part of the tool kit that we use to understand and improve engineering productivity and developer satisfaction."

5/5 stars

With Plandek, their engineering teams have now intertwined Plandek’s metrics with their workflow by reviewing them in their agile ceremonies such as daily stand-ups, retrospectives, and planning meetings. This positive behavioral change has meant the fintech now operates from a place of proactiveness rather than reactiveness, they spot material risks as and when they arise meaning they can promptly address them rather than deal with them after the fact once they have transpired.

The teams have changed their way of thinking and now:

1. See data as the primary driver in their success rather than supplementary to it. Teams are now regularly thinking about how engineering practices lead to positive business outcomes.
2. Spend far less time creating these reports and more time working on delivering value to their end users due to the tool’s automation.

Final Thoughts

Below you can see how the fintech at an organizational level compares to other Plandek customers under several key performance indicators. Weighting the fintech’s benchmarks against their Plandek penetration ranking (engagement / total users) shows they’re currently our best-performing client.

How have they achieved this? The fintech has consistent executive sponsorship and are in our top 50% for client engagement (their top users sign in multiple times a week to review their metrics). The successful adoption of Plandek by all levels of the organization, from leaders to teams, is hugely important to getting the most from out of Plandek and achieving these kinds of results.