CTO interview: Steve Cook, revolutionising the banking infrastructure
The traditional banking system has a legacy infrastructure and outdated applications which sometimes can be as much as 40–50 years old. On the other hand, the challenger banks don’t want to build and maintain infrastructure and prefer to go for SaaS solutions.
Form3 has found a way to serve these two opposite clients, they take away the complexity and help clients with the last stages of their payment processing journey. Read the latest interview and learn how to spot the unique market opportunity and to create products that work for a wide range of clients.
A career in trading and some entrepreneurial experiences had brought you to Hong Kong. Can you please tell me how did you get to where you are at Form3?
I’ve been working in financial technology for more than 25 years. I started as a software engineer but quickly realized that I enjoy working with people more than with computers. That is what I’ve therefore done most of my career. For me, it is more rewarding and challenging. I’ve been doing that for a long time, and spent some time in Asia, running several businesses there.
I’ve been back in the UK for 7 years, which has a FinTech scene with lots of opportunities for capital raising and engineering challenges. It’s very much a place to be if you want to build a new business.
I’m one of the co-founding members with Michael Mueller (CEO) and Mike Walters (CPO). We all come from a banking technology background where we’ve seen the infrastructure and software maintained by the banks. Both were very old and very complex. At one bank my department had around 350 different applications on different tech stacks, languages, and databases (C#, Java, mainframe, Linux, etc).
If you had to explain Form3 in simple words, how would you present it?
We saw an opportunity in simplifying the existing IT infrastructure of banks. We took away a lot of the complexity, including real-time payment infrastructure. There are a lot of benefits for our customers as every system to maintain has a cost.
Does outsourcing improve security?
Yes, especially in the banking space where banks sit on hundreds of legacy applications built during different times, sometimes 40 or 50 years ago. Keeping on top of vulnerability management and keeping all up to date is very complex and time-consuming.
For example, with Form3 we have a lot of automation. Every few weeks we completely turn down and rebuild our entire environment so that we can guarantee that it always has the latest patches.
Moving to a well-managed SaaS Platform is a much more secure option than maintaining it yourself.
Would you say you’re a competitor of core banking systems like Mambu?
No, we focus on the part of the payment which is the last part of the process (FasterPayment, BACS, SEPA, Direct Debit, confirmation of Paye, etc.). There is a lot of complimentary FinTech in the space, so we partner with firms like Mambu, 10x, ThoughtMachine and others.
Who are your clients?
We have a broad array of different customers, both digital banks and traditional banks. For traditional banks, they have a lot of legacy tech so there is a very good opportunity for us. We also deal a lot with non-bank financial institutions (Square, N26). If they come as a new digital bank, they don’t want to build a big legacy infrastructure and we partner with them.
What are you looking for in developers when you interview?
We are on the mission of providing a critical service to banks, which has to operate 24/7, often in real-time. It is obviously a very sensitive area. The system design is highly resilient, even when things break, and has tight SLAs. A lot of effort goes into designing redundancy and resiliency. Our core underlying platform is a multi-cloud Go micro-services kind of stack. So, when we go and look for engineers to join Form3, we typically look for those who have worked in distributed environments, rather than a traditional monolith. They often don’t have direct experience in finance.
And in terms of personality?
Another key thing is that we have a very distributed and autonomous team: all our teams comprise both product and engineering, both working very closely together. It’s very much a DevOps model here. Each team is responsible for the business requirements, building automated tests, development and running their service in production.
So again, that kind of feeds into the type of person that we’re trying to find. We look for people that enjoy working with a lot of autonomy and have taken a lot of responsibility for their previous roles.
Any fun story that happened during your career?
There is a one story that sticks with me. Many years ago I accidentally deleted a customer’s production environment. We had installed a test system for a customer, but they then took it to production without telling us.
I was assigned to upgrade their test environment. As I believed it was a test environment, I deleted it and reinstalled it. After that I started getting complaints from people around me saying the system stopped working. This was like 25 years ago, when we didn’t have cloud back-ups or anything of that kind. In the end the only way to fix it was to send someone off to fetch backup tapes that were off-site.
If you want to connect with Steve, click here.
To learn more about From3, visit their website: form3.tech
If you’re a techie working on something exciting or you simply want to have a chat, get in touch with me. I’m currently CTO at Kolleno.com
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