FF News Tattoo Studio | Zenitech: Demystifying Technology to Deliver Real Business Value

At the FF News Tattoo Studio at Fintech Talents Festival 2025, Christopher Lacy-Hulbert, founder of Zenitech, discusses why the company exists and what it takes to make technology deliver real value. Zenitech Fintech Delivery Model isn’t about copying frameworks — it’s about solving real business problems with first-principles thinking. Lacy-Hulbert explains Zenitech wasn’t founded just to fill a market gap. It was driven by personal motivation and the way he approaches problems. He describes himself as an engineer first, particularly a “first principles” engineer, focused on stripping things back and building practical solutions. For him, the point of technology is impact in real business situations, not innovation for innovations sake.

Lacy-Hulbert links this thinking to time spent in big organisations like Yahoo and Betfair, working on platforms and seeing what happens when companies scale quickly and those experiences shaped his belief that the biggest differentiator is people: finding high-calibre talent, forming high-performing teams, and staying focused on outcomes that matter to the business.

When Lacy-Hulbert is asked what problem Zenitech is really trying to solve, Lacy-Hulbert comes back to one theme: demystifying technology. Beyond delivery, R&D, and consulting, he sees a major barrier in how hard it can be for non-technical stakeholders to make sense of what technologists are saying. Until organisations can properly translate and understand the choices in front of them, he argues, they won’t get full value from their tech investment. Lacy-Hulbert talks about the joy of repeatedly building new experiences, technologies, and platforms, across very different sectors and mentions areas including banking, education, healthcare, and defence, emphasising that while the domain changes, that satisfaction comes from creating something useful and seeing it come to life.

The conversation then moves to a practical scaling question familiar to fintech leaders: the “two pizza team” problem. Zenitech’s view is straightforward, there’s no universal recipe; referencing the widely copied “Spotify model”, noting that even Spotify later warned people not to treat it as a copy and paste template. What works depends on the technology, the problem, and the team dynamics. Zenitech also points out that real programmes often go far beyond neat team-size ideals, with seven or eight teams working together on one initiative, “14 or 16 pizzas” in the metaphor. At that scale, success relies on strong programme structure, governance, and an operating model that supports coordination without killing delivery speed.

To make that work, Lacy-Hulbert highlights Zenitech’s Delivery Services Assurance Competency Centre, which focuses on designing the right delivery and governance approach for each client engagement. His underlying message is practical: scaling isn’t solved by copying someone else’s framework, it’s solved by building the right model for your context.

By anchoring the Zenitech Fintech Delivery Model in custom-built governance and team structures, the company ensures that speed and scale don’t come at the cost of clarity or value.