In the realm of technological innovation within banking, platform teams often play the unsung hero role. While CEOs and other leaders may grab the spotlight, it’s the platform engineers who truly drive progress.
Platform engineering forms the backbone of modern technology innovation, shaping how banks interact with, enhance, and leverage their IT assets.
These dedicated teams concentrate on refining the mechanisms that drive efficient development and deployment. They nurture and elevate the organizational ecosystems that enable banks to craft exceptional software solutions. While some may argue that it’s feasible to operate without a specialized platform team, why take the chance of missing out on the path to innovative excellence?
Banking Dynamics: An Industry in Constant Flux
Financial institutions constantly grapple with the ever-evolving landscape of regulations. While there may not be a predictable schedule for the introduction of new banking rules, the sector remains a prime focus for lawmakers.
From changing economic conditions to financial crises, many factors can prompt regulatory change. As the 2024 regulatory agenda revealed, legislators have no qualms about increasing scrutiny.
Then there’s the general public.
In 2024, the Motley Fool asked consumers about their banking preferences. 91% of respondents said they prioritized digital banking when choosing a bank. 75% said they’d feel fine switching banks if they found a better provider. Your clients expect the world on a platter, and brand loyalty won’t hinder them from getting it.
Navigating the Challenges of Innovative Banking Practices
Technology is frequently viewed as the ultimate solution for financial institutions, aiding in their adaptation to regulations, meeting consumer demands, and ensuring oversight. However, the reality is that effective technology implementation requires substantial effort.
Software development entails significant costs, which persist even after deployment. The ongoing maintenance requirements, the necessity to reassess existing products, and the challenges posed by technical debt can all hinder progress.
Regulatory frameworks can also constrict innovation. Developers who want to innovate have to handle governance tasks instead.
Code management takes 35% of engineers’ time. Despite the creative potential of your engineers, the demands of maintenance and other administrative tasks often leave little room in their schedules for coding sessions. Inefficient workflows further stifle their creativity, hindering their ability to bring unique ideas to fruition.
Why Innovation Needs Platform Teams
There are plenty of ways to solve the innovation problem. Platform teams offer flexible, cost-effective answers that many modern banks view as necessities.
Platform teams play a crucial role in fostering innovation by constructing efficient pathways through developer platforms. These platforms serve as ecosystems of backend tools designed to enforce productive and secure operational practices.
Consider this example: Many developer platforms offer engineers the capability to provision cloud infrastructure directly from a user-friendly web dashboard. This eliminates the need for engineers to memorize complex terminal commands, allowing them to concentrate on leveraging the cloud for their projects. This is about more than simple convenience: platforms reduce cognitive load.
Cognitive load refers to the mental effort required to solve a problem, with complexity being a key factor. For example, a task may have an inherent cognitive load due to its technical nature, while additional cognitive load can arise from poorly designed elements, further complicating the process.
Studies have shown that cognitive load limits creativity. Knowledge workers with high cognitive load can still perform, but their ideas could be more varied. These employees may also be more likely to engage in non-work-related activities.
In banking software development, cognitive load can impede productivity. Platform teams play a crucial role in alleviating this burden by maintaining secure mechanisms that enable engineers to perform necessary tasks with minimal cognitive effort, fostering innovation in the process.
What Do Banking Industry Platform Teams Do?
Platform teams fulfill many responsibilities to help streamline operations:
Platform teams centralize governance and standardization
Comprehensive developer ecosystems are instrumental in establishing consistent organizational practices. By defining universal processes and guidelines accessible to all, they remove the guesswork from application development, deployment, and testing.
Providing infrastructure and tooling
Platform teams play a critical role in ensuring developers have access to reliable infrastructure and tools. They are responsible for creating essential components such as CI/CD pipelines and monitoring systems, while also facilitating access to reusable components that empower engineers to build innovative solutions.
Improving security and compliance
Platform engineers collaborate closely with security and governance teams to swiftly address vulnerabilities. This collaborative approach enables banks to enforce comprehensive security practices, ensuring that potential vulnerabilities are identified and addressed proactively rather than reacting to individual incidents.
Delivering cost-optimizing insights
Investing in platforms enables organizations to monitor usage patterns and resource sharing more effectively, democratizing access to business intelligence across the organization. This shift facilitates better cost-control practices and optimizes infrastructure spending by providing greater visibility into resource utilization and facilitating informed decision-making based on real-time data insights.
Optimizing the Developer Experience
Platform teams provide self-service tools and harmonized documentation. Developers can deploy, scale, and troubleshoot without moving mountains to find answers.
Why work to minimize frustration for your engineers? It’s simple: you need to do so to strengthen your organization. Bad developer experience hampers productivity, retention, and even code quality.
Keeping banks agile
Platform teams play a vital role in accelerating mission-critical development cycles and making proven processes repeatable. By abstracting away complexities and democratizing access to essential tooling, these teams empower developers to focus on business logic without needing to be experts in every underlying technology.
This orchestration of efforts by platform teams enables banks to respond more efficiently to market demands and regulatory changes, fostering more secure and innovative banking solutions.
If you’re interested in learning more about how a developer platform enhances software development, watch the video now.
Foster a Culture That Facilitates Innovation
How can you adopt a more innovative approach to banking software? Your platform team should focus on strategic collaboration:
- Build a platform that promotes collaboration and autonomy. Use StackSpot EDP to create and share API catalogs and software patterns that enforce centralized standards and facilitate teamwork.
- Manage teams, technologies, and environments uniformly. StackSpot Workspaces lets you manage talent and development assets cohesively, providing high-level visibility of technology decisions and patterns.
- Provide useful, knowledge-driven context. Integrate StackSpot AI code assistant into your engineering workflows to offer developers better suggestions that boost productivity.
- Prioritize developer-first features to avoid cognitive overload and accelerate creativity. Build reusable Stacks, Starters, Plugins, Actions, and other content using StackSpot’s Engine framework to minimize work duplication and manual labor.
- Leverage dependable security and compliance guardrails. StackSpot Cloud Services include built-in checks for safer distributed computing.
Conclusion
When before the establishing establishing a platform team. This dedicated team can significantly contribute to fostering a culture of innovation within your organization. By providing developers with the necessary tools, resources, and support to streamline their workflows and focus on solving business challenges, platform teams can increase overall satisfaction among engineers. Ultimately, happier engineers lead to improved customer experiences, reduced regulatory friction, and more sustainable growth for your organization.
If you’re interested in learning more about how to create an organizational culture of innovation through the establishment of a platform team, continue exploring our resources.
