In a crowded and commoditised software market, businesses are seriously challenged to find the right partners and solutions to meet their unique requirements.
The trick is to prioritise partner selection and go for the one that can demonstrate, with certainty through use cases and track record, that ownership of customer outcomes is the core value at the heart of their company. This is according to Wesley Buck, Solutions Architect at Retro Rabbit / SmarTek21, a leading software design and engineering consultancy focusing on the banking and insurance sectors.
“Retro Rabbit / SmarTek21’s tagline is ‘Building digital products that matter, with teams that care’. All too often companies are faced with sales jargon, to the effect that suppliers seeking their business will solve their operating problems. However, this is rarely the case, what they usually seek is to sell ‘products’ otherwise known as box dropping. To actually solve ‘business problems’ for a customer it is essential to partner with them, understand the intricate workings of their operation, and collaborate with them while bringing deep expertise and technical knowledge to the table. This is how we approach all customers. We partner with them to solve their problems. We have built a culture in which our success is inextricably linked to that of our clients, and their problems become our problems. In fact, much of our success as a company, plus many of our capabilities, stem from our relentless ownership of success as a shared outcome, for our customers and for us. This is our MO or as we like to put it – it’s our DNA,” says Buck.
Retro Rabbit / SmarTek21 owns outcomes, not just outputs.
“Our main business objective is to master digital advantage for enterprises globally. In the achievement of this goal, we prioritise ownership and accountability for the overall success of our client’s business through the deployment of our world competitive digital solutions. In a consulting engagement, both are critical: ownership ensures successful delivery, while product ownership ensures the right product is built,” Buck says.
He explains that to Retro Rabbit / SmarTek21, ownership means a great deal more than just delivering on client requirements on time and within budget. It means embracing sometimes ‘brutal honesty,’ working with clients to address potential issues beyond the scope of the project, and ensuring that clients get solutions that actually meet their current and future requirements.
Ownership in practice
Buck cites the example of a project they undertook to rewrite a legacy system on a leading bank’s cross-border payment platform. “We noted while we were modernising the system that the backend systems we needed to integrate with were extremely unstable. Instead of trying to make it their problem, we started building fallbacks, mock responses, and mock services to ensure that if they went down we could continue working. Our culture of ownership means we’re not going to stop working just because there’s a bottleneck or a hurdle.”
Retro Rabbit / SmarTek21’s ownership culture also means it recommends solutions that realistically align with clients’ strategies. For example, motivating for simpler solutions with a lower total cost of ownership.
When Retro Rabbit / SmarTek21 engaged with a fintech startup, the client had already selected a technology solution. However, while the solution was appropriate for an enterprise environment, it would have been too expensive for a startup to run. Retro Rabbit / SmarTek21 therefore recommended a more cost-effective solution”. Buck says: “Because we care about clients’ success and long term strategies, we will also advise them if off the shelf software will meet their needs better than a custom enterprise solution.”
In another engagement, a client was considering three technology choices but had concerns about potential security risks with one of them. Buck’s team found that this solution would best meet the client’s needs, offering a better return on investment and easier long term maintenance and management. They recommended measures to mitigate any potential security risks, making the solution a viable contender for consideration again.
Retro Rabbit/SmarTek21’s team also demonstrated its agility, problem solving capabilities and sense of ownership when a client wanted development and testing done in parallel from the beginning of the project. In the early stages of development and before any software was ready for testing, the testing team applied themselves to building a testing suite to do end-to-end testing of the existing environment to serve as a baseline for testing the new platform.
Buck notes that Retro Rabbit / SmarTek21 developers have an advantage over in-house developers in large banks, in that they work with numerous clients of all sizes in the financial sector.
“In major banks, developers may be constrained by the guardrails in place in the corporate environment. As consultants working with multiple clients, we can explore a range of emerging technologies and learn what works and what doesn’t. Our sense of ownership means we offer insight and knowledge of the latest approaches while also working closely with clients’ security, risk, and governance teams to ensure we align with their protocols. Our clients lean on our experience and knowledge to innovate without the risk,” he says.