Vo1t
Note: Vo1t was acquired by Genesis Trading in 2020.
Introduction
Vo1t is a premier Blockchain and DLT custody, depository, and lending FinTech based in London. Providing security and safety to its clients all across the world.
Challenge
Being a FinTech start-up, Vo1t has obvious challenges of developing solutions and a new feature for their clients while staying compliant and secure.
Solution
We applied design thinking, service design, and jobs to be done approaches, to make sure that while we are working on compliance - it always customer-centric and people- centric. We’ve facilitated service design sessions, building user journey and event storming to understand end-to-end flows for all the customer-facing and internal processes.
Later on, we were able to rate each step and each event against various regulatory compliance, security, and other quality criteria.
Outcomes
The main outcome was ensuring that Operations, Accounts, Security, and Technology departments are all on the same page. Everyone speaks the same language and uses the same terminology.
“David provided us with crucial advice and went above and beyond to help us set up our processes around compliance and regulatory tech. He facilitated environment and workshops where we can learn more about our product, and how it fits into the market and regulatory environment.”
Osan Salih, Chief Operating Officer, Vo1t
“David has been our Compliance and Regulation consultant driving our road map from design to implementation, we have moved through several projects including e-money license and ISO27001, he has lead from the front using a logic based frame work and has kept the momentum in up from day one driving workshops and reaching out to 3rd parties drawing in resources to get the job done, he has proven himself as a vital member of the team and has taken each task in his stride not matter how abstract the requirement.”
Milo Smith, Head of Accounts, Vo1t
Deutsche Bank - GTB
Deutsche Bank – Corporate Banking is a leader in cash management, trade finance, and securities services. We were lucky enough to work with them on a strategic programme.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Deutsche approached us with exciting and unique problems that they were facing in the field of Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing, as a truly global bank, and one of the world leaders in cash management they wanted to improve their systems, but also improve the way work is done and increase speed of iterations. This was also a crucial time since 5MLD - Money Laundering Directive 5 was scheduled for 2018.
Notable problems that we’ve perceived:
When developing for large enterprises - products in a vacuum are intrinsically less important than integrated into current flow. We wanted to provide maximum value, and that means we would have to be able to integrate into existing systems.
Working in a large, international bank can mean a lot of red-tape. When we started we knew that we wouldn’t be able to get everything we need, and we needed contingencies for almost anything.
SOLUTION
We decided to go with a mixture of good old training, where we will be able to explain how agile works in real-time as we went, and workshops to help with communications and prioritisation. On top of that, we were very lucky that our product development started along with Deutsche's larger cloud transformation efforts, and we were able to deploy best practices in Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery.
Customer Jobs helped us understand what and why do we needed to build, and how the next generation of services should change people’s lives. Application of the Customer Jobs also helped us define a simple set of rules, by which we could always prioritise requirements, and identify what’s important and what can wait.
User Journey Mapping drilled into details of our research, and provided us end-to-end flows. We used Journey Maps across the department, letting UX and Software Architect populate required fields, and effectively compose requirements. One of the advantages of Journey Maps. Is that it’s very easy to model inputs and outputs of each action - which proved critical when we needed to create high fidelity mocks of the unavailable systems.
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery practices ensured that engineers could focus on solving real problems, instead of firefighting with environment and infrastructure.
We also feel like it's important to point out that we pressed hard to make sure we could interview different kinds of stakeholders and participants within a system. Journey Mapping and Value Chain mapping highlighted important types of actors (users) that we should interview:
Operators: To understand the pain points of the operators, who have to accomplish their work, to improve their lives, improve retention and job satisfaction, and free employees to do more business activities.
Supervisors and middle-management: to understand the metrics that they were tracking, and what kind of activities do they want to focus on.
Senior Management: to have an end-to-end picture, and see how the process can be upgraded strategically.
OUTCOMES
We were able to deliver results ahead of time, and have two mini-presentations to senior stakeholders along the way. In the end, we’ve shipped product into staging, presented to senior stakeholders, directors, head of anti-financial crime, and raised money for the next phase of the product development.
“I engaged with David Grigoryan, who came across as an expert in his area of expertise and highly flexible in managing changing requirements.”