Following the sun down under

One of our most recent clients is Xinja, a starter bank in the mould of Monzo, Starling and Atom that’s in the process of building Australia’s first 100% digital bank or ‘neobank’.

Xinja believes banks can and should help their customers make more out of their money, which is why their passionate team of bankers, technologists and customer experience designers is creating a more intuitive, straightforward and – yes – fun way to do this.

Equal Experts is Xinja’s technical partner, and we’re building the platform its first product will run on. This is an incredibly exciting project and a great challenge as we expand into Australia.  

In fact it’s so exciting, we’ve spent as much time as possible working on it since we began a few months ago.

Working round the clock

That doesn’t mean we’ve lost sight of our work-life balance though. Rather, we’ve structured a global team that can keep momentum going and ultimately give the customers what they want as quickly as possible.

How do we do that? Well, in the sweet spots between the Australian and Canadian working days (despite being an entire timezone apart, it comes together quite well!) the client in Sydney works closely with our mobile team in Calgary on the product and design.

After a quick call with us in London to define acceptance criteria and implementation, we pick up the slack to build the platform and the services.

Finally, as London calls it a night and Calgary’s pouring its morning coffee, the baton gets passed back to Canada to build the app.

Given the timezones it’s tricky to all get together, but we think it’s important to make that happen too. So once a week we all jump on a call for a weekly demo, and every few months we get together in person. All these things make what could be a distant relationship much closer, and as a result we all really feel part of one team, working towards one goal together.

Using the expertise and timezones of our three teams in this way means we can finish the day with a ‘buddy build’ of the app that Xinja can pick up in the morning, then give us quick and instant feedback before starting the process again.

High five

In fact, in just five weeks of working this way, we can already demo how our platform updates balances, transactions and notifications and how quickly the customer will be able to see those changes in their app.

Kudos to the team at Xinja. Being able to deliver in this way only works because we have a client that is flexible, forward-thinking and determined to get the right product into the hands of their customers.

Watch this space for more updates.