But our journey has only just begun

When I joined Nomo Fintech in June 2021, we were a few weeks from launching Nomo, the first ever fully digital Sharia-compliant international bank which the team had built in a record time of less than 9 months, fully remotely!?

?The focus at the time was to get the app launched and start working on Day 2 – yes, even before Day 1 was out the door, not an unfamiliar approach for any digital fintech start-up!

The challenge we faced was that the Day 2 list was longer and more challenging than the launch proposition we built for Day 1, which included Property Finance, Investments, the Android app, Multi-currency accounts and establishing partnerships with other financial institutions in the GCC, not to mention all the work that happens behind the scenes for the app to function and embedding into our Ways of Working to improve and enhance our efficiency.

All of this as we scaled the Nomo Fintech team and made the transition from Build only to Run and Build simultaneously.

Fast forward 16 months and I am completely blown away by the progress the Nomo Fintech and Nomo team have achieved… We’ve launched our Android app, Property Finance (Buy to Let) is live, Investments is coming soon as is Multi-currency and Open Banking… All of this while delivering some of the backlog features needed to build on the launch proposition – totalling 22 iOS releases, not to mention over 100 back-end releases! Our customer numbers are growing and with it the interest in Nomo and what we have to offer to customers wanting to use the only fully digital international Islamic banking app.

How has this all been possible? Quite simply, having a brilliant, committed team! In today's, post-COVID working environment, I would be wrong to say it’s not been challenging to grow our squads from 8 to 14, all delivering different customer and platform solutions, but we manage it by carefully structuring cross-functional squads within business domains underpinned by the mobile platform, CRM platform, Data and DevOps teams to deliver at scale.

We have been very fortunate in recruiting a team of like-minded, customer focussed, technically inquisitive, professional, positively challenging, fintech-loving individuals that want to deliver great outcomes and solutions – without doubt, the best team ever! If you want to be part of the Nomo Fintech journey and would like to be part of this award-winning team, then please check out our live job posts on LinkedIn and soon to be new Careers Page on our Nomo Website. ?

To know more about Egypt's Engineering and IT opportunities, reach out to Omar El Masry , And you can contact James Fisher for UK and Dubai roles. We are always looking for great talent!

You may have seen the Nomo Fintech post last week about our quarterly PI Planning week. This was Nomo Fintech’s second PI Planning session and was a great opportunity to get the team together, both virtually and in person. It allowed us to align our priorities, the business strategy, the technical vision, and the product appetite for the next quarter, but most importantly it was a great opportunity to look back at what a great quarter we had and the solutions we delivered. With so many achievements across so many areas, not everything we delivered will have an immediate customer impact but will set us up for the next 3-9 months as we start to focus on our expansion in the Middle East.

With a focus from a tech perspective, the coming quarter is very much centred on embedding the use of some of the new tooling we introduced last quarter, whilst maturing the practice of our shift-left philosophy to be ever more efficient.

Observability is a key focus in the next quarter and the tooling we have introduced (including DataDog) will be the enabler for the SRE squad to build, enhance and uplift the performance and efficiency of our existing tech stack. The squad will be focussing on enhancing our SLO and SLI, building on the proactive monitoring already in place and obviously automate automate automate...

As we scale and start to introduce more versions of the Nomo app, the delivery of containerisation will be key. The introduction of Kubernetes, federated GraphQL and Temporal workflow orchestration in the last quarter were critical to allow the DevOps team to improve the componentisation of the solution allowing for the squads to be more autonomous and ultimately improving our delivery cadence. As we start to expand with the partnerships in the Middle East, this will become more and more critical to allow more versions of the Nomo app to be released.

Our test automation capability continues to grow and improve in keeping with the fast pace of developments and ensuring our quality is of the highest levels and service impacts are kept to a minimum.

As you would expect for any new Fintech, our tech stack was built with flexibility and configurability at the core of the design principles. This allows Nomo Fintech to introduce ‘new to market’ technologies as they become available to improve our offering. The tools we introduced last quarter have already been used successfully in a number of areas and will continue to be developed and included in other parts of the tech stack during the next quarter and beyond.?

Over the next few months, the Nomo Fintech team will be publishing updates on our progress as we continued to deliver award-winning digital Islamic banking solutions for the Middle East. Watch this space...

Written by our Chief Technology Officer, Simon Bateman