Our new Warsaw tech hub is laying the open banking rails across Europe
When your mission is to create the infrastructure on which the whole of Europe can build open banking services, finding enough tech talent is a challenge. It’s why we opened our new tech hub in Warsaw, Poland to put extra fuel in the tank.
With the full effect of PSD2 a mere months away, the race to offer market coverage for open banking services across Europe is on. And the result is clear. Having a first-mover advantage when PSD2 comes into force is essential – whether you’re providing the tech that financial institutions can build services upon or you’re building new digital banking services to better serve consumers.
We saw the need for new engineering talent rising, as we tried to expand our Stockholm team fast enough to keep up with our ambitions to connect all of Europe. But we knew that tapping into another pool of talent was the best way to plug a future gap.
Building the team
Poland has become a hub for tech talent and innovation in recent years, with tech behemoths like Google making landfall there. Warsaw is also home to a well-known tech university and a vibrant startup scene, so we knew the quality of talent was there.
For us, this isn’t an exercise in lowering costs or outsourcing the boring stuff. We are setting up a fully fledged engineering arm of Tink, where engineers have autonomy and responsibility for an entire piece of the process. Their expertise makes Tink stronger.
By the end of the year, we expect the team to be 40-strong. And we plan to double it in 2020.
Building the tech
The problem our Warsaw engineering team will solve is far from simple. We are currently live in 10 markets across Europe with the ambition of covering Europe in its entirety – and then going beyond it.
The questions for us centred on how to continue building the systems that create seamless integration with banks when the number of organisations we support grows to 30,000 or more. How do we best navigate thousands of different systems and information cycles, and how can we adapt our approach to each one?
The aim is consistently accessing every system so we can retrieve real-time data successfully, and push ourselves to be better all the time.
Ultimately, their powers will combine with that of our Stockholm team to keep laying the rails across Europe – the foundation for any open banking initiative.
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