IT’S TIME THE UK LEARNED TO MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS

By Nick Mills, EMEA GM, CircleCI

 

The UK is famous around the world for its financial technology ecosystem.

Britain’s FinTech sector received $1.1 billion of investment into 77 startups in the first quarter of 2020, with investment growing 63% from Q4 2019 due to several large deals early in the year.

This investment is being pumped into a wide variety of startups that are really shaking up the financial system with new ways of working – providing businesses and customers with faster, better, and more innovative solutions in areas as varied as payments, savings, security, investment, loans, financing, insurance, remittances, account information analytics, banking infrastructure and more.

Open Banking has been a catalyst for all this, of course. The European PSD2 legislation has allowed banks and startups to use APIs to talk to one another in new and exciting ways.

But so too was the Financial Services Act 2012, which streamlined the process for licensing new banks, as well as the 2010 Government’s “Tech City” plan, creating investment and policy that laid the foundations for the innovative tech ecosystem we have today.

And it’s businesses within it, like Monzo, Starling and others, that have been pushing themselves to take advantage of these opportunities and bring exciting new products to customers.

This is also reflected in the levels of investment in some of the most thrilling innovators. The $500m raise Revolut recently completed proves that the fruits of this brave new world are only just now beginning to fully ripen.

Britain’s global advantage has no doubt been aided by an incredibly high level of productivity in the UK tech sector as a whole. For software teams using CI/CD workflows, we are able to measure productivity using a metric called Throughput – which is essentially the number of times per day the average software team pushes new code.

On this scale, the UK is almost twice as productive as the global average – and, interestingly, more productive than European counterparts in both Germany and France.

But there are, apparently, some downsides to having such a productive, world-class financial technology ecosystem.

New data released recently in our 2020 State of Software Delivery report shows British software developers are more risk-averse than their counterparts in the US.

More specifically, the success rates of UK developers were very high. This may sound positive – but in software development, too much success often indicates a lack of innovation.

Failure is critically important. As in life, if your software isn’t ever failing, then typically you aren’t trying enough new things.

In the UK, the average success rate for code testing shown in the data was 94.7%. In the US, it was just 83% – proving the old adage true, that in Silicon Valley they really do move fast and break things more often.

So where might the UK’s apparent innovation handbrake be coming from?

It’s likely that Britain’s finance-heavy technology ecosystem could actually be hindering efforts to innovate.

Finance is, by necessity, a regulation-heavy industry. And one of the reasons British fintechs have been able to succeed so quickly is the fact that they’ve been able to deftly navigate the choppy waters of financial legislation whilst still providing new, improved customer service.

But this does come at a cost. Other areas of technological innovation don’t come with quite so many strings attached. US tech giants like Facebook and Google have created new industries, sailing through uncharted waters – where legislation can barely keep up.

This allows them to try new things and fail without any serious legal recourse. The same can’t be said of Britain’s fintechs, as every new product release has to be carefully scrutinised by regulators.

When faced with this harsh reality of developing in finance, it is perhaps unsurprising that the UK tech sector is both highly productive and risk-averse. Both attributes are necessary to keep churning out new ideas in a tough industry.

But constant creativity in such a competitive industry is hard. The problems needing to be solved tend only to get more difficult as the industry matures. The nation’s innovators will soon have to find ways to shorten the innovation cycle and fail faster.

And a key part of improving this innovative mindset over time is to look at the types of process the nation’s developers are using.

Workflows have come a long way from the staccato “waterfall” methods we may once have been used to – where projects are mapped out into distinct, sequential phases, with each new phase beginning only when the prior phase has been completed.

In software, that just slows things down.

Agile methodology was an improvement on this – where software is developed in sprints, with a Minimum Viable Product being created, then constantly iterated over and improved upon.

But even agile is starting to feel outdated. The most innovative organisations now work in a continuous way – with code being deployed and tested daily, and automation taking over much of the laborious, repetitive tasks that used to be required of software developers.

Now CI/CD platforms can give that time back to the developers, to allow them to spend their time doing what they do best – moving fast, breaking things, and getting the next generation of British innovation in front of customers as quickly as possible.

 

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