N26’s Will Sorby on Scaling Up As A Cloud Bank

Will Sorby, Director of Product Strategy & Monetisation at N26, sits down with Doug Mackenzie to discuss scaling up as a financial institution that utilises cloud technology.

“If we cycle back 5-10 years through old technology systems, what does a product development plan look like? It’s effectively a group of people who will sit in a room with some level of understanding of their users and the market, and they will think about what do we want to build over the next 12 months?”

“Because of the way that you have been able to deploy your technology, you may be looking at quarterly release cycles. So, effectively that means only every 3 months are you ever launching things live to your customers. Then you sort of have to wait three months to see what happens and of course, you don’t know it could be good, it could be bad and you’re another 3 months before you can bring in something new.”

“We go to the modern day, and you think about cloud banking as we use it, that has a lot of implications many of which are around how we think about launching products. We will be putting code into the live environment. So effectively updating the app for our users in terms of what they can use maybe 50 times a day. So effectively constantly and we can do that within about half an hour. We can go from having someone sat in a room in one of our offices in Europe typing out a solution to something, and it gets fixed and updated in the app within 30 minutes.”