Boosting developer productivity in banking and financial services

Matt Saunders

Published on 23 June 2025

6 min read

Matt Saunders

Published on 23 June 2025

6 min read

Find out what's holding up developer productivity in the financial service industry – and how you can overcome these common challenges.

Getting developers productive in a financial services company directly impacts digital transformation efforts. Research shows that 83% of IT teams are trying to do too much in too little time. Four critical barriers consistently emerge as the primary obstacles to developer productivity in this sector.

1. Inconsistent tooling creates development friction

Legacy systems built on outdated technologies are a barrier to digital transformation in financial services organisations because developers often need to work with these systems alongside more modern technologies. Each requires a different approach and cadence, causing frictional dissonance in getting things done.

Developers constantly context-switch between different environments, often with unique interfaces, deployment processes, and debugging tools, which slows them down and reduces overall productivity. New team members face a particularly steep learning curve, as they need to master an understanding of these disparate systems rather than being able to focus on actual development.

Organisations addressing this challenge are investing in platform standardisation initiatives that provide consistent development experiences across code bases and projects. Modern development platforms that can integrate with legacy systems while providing a unified toolchain help reduce the cognitive overhead of multiple environments. Containerisation technologies enable teams to standardise deployment processes even when underlying systems vary significantly.

2. Lack of clear team structures hampers decision-making

Many financial services organisations operate with matrixed or siloed teams where responsibilities are splintered and poorly defined. Ownership boundaries might not be clear to developers, slowing their understanding of where they should focus. This organisational ambiguity creates multiple productivity problems.

Unclear team structures slow decision-making processes as developers have to navigate artisanal approval chains or get clarification from many stakeholders. This slows everything down when important decisions require input from team members whose responsibilities overlap or conflict. Multiple teams can also accidentally work on similar problems without coordination, and missing dependencies can cause integration failures later on in the development lifecycle.

Introducing a structured approach to team organisation can boost developer productivity. Team Topologies is a leading framework that introduces four fundamental team types for “a no-nonsense, team-friendly, humanistic approach to building and running software systems.” It’s a step-by-step adaptive model with an emphasis on optimising your teams’ interactions for better flow.

Many banks rely heavily on centralised platform teams, which can cause bottlenecks. Transitioning to a Team Topologies model enables stream-aligned teams to own customer or business value streams directly, supported by platform teams that provide self-service capabilities. This reduces handoffs, clarifies responsibilities, and accelerates delivery.

3. Misaligned development reduces business value

Compliance and operational continuity are always top priorities for financial institutions, but this focus can lead to rigidly overplanned development cycles, and a lack of alignment with actually delivering business value. Without agile and realistic product management, developers can end up wasting time on low-impact maintenance work rather than delivering meaningful value for customers and the business.

This misalignment manifests in several ways. Development teams may have to prioritise paying down technical debt over adding customer-facing features, or focus on compliance requirements with minimal business impact. Resource allocation decisions made without clear business value criteria can lead to over-engineering solutions or neglecting high-impact opportunities.

High-performing organisations can address these problems by using product management practices that more directly connect development work to business outcomes. Value stream mapping helps teams understand how their work contributes to customer value and business objectives, and where the organisation is accidentally causing delays and friction. Re-prioritising regularly allows developers to focus on high-impact work rather than maintenance tasks that may not actually provide customer-facing benefits.

4. Restrictive regulations reduce development autonomy

Regulatory requirements and data governance can create significant overhead that slows development cycles and prevents developers from working autonomously. Security and compliance needs are, of course, absolutely critical in financial services, but are often complied with through tedious manual processes or overly restrictive controls that frustrate development teams and impede productivity.

Extensive documentation requirements, lengthy approval processes, and rigid security protocols can significantly extend development timelines, with developers spending time on compliance-related activities that add limited technical or apparent business value.

Forward-thinking organisations are automating compliance processes to reduce this manual overhead while still ticking the boxes for the necessary controls. DevSecOps practices integrate security and compliance checking into development pipelines, enabling teams to identify issues early without sacrificing development velocity. Defining policy-as-code allows organisations to codify compliance requirements, making them more consistent and less burdensome for development teams.

Building sustainable solutions

These four barriers are interconnected and need a consistent and comprehensive approach to solve them, rather than isolated pieces of work or "go faster" policies. Organisations that successfully improve developer productivity address tooling consistency, clarity around team structure and responsibilities, and are aligned to delivering business value, with regulatory and compliance taken care of without friction. Sustainable productivity improvements need both technical and organisational changes to support effective development practices while meeting the unique requirements of financial services environments.

Ready to boost developer productivity in your financial services organisation?

Written by

Matt Saunders

DevOps Lead

From a background as a Linux sysadmin, Matt is an authority in all things DevOps. At Adaptavist and beyond, he champions DevOps ways of working, helping teams maximise people, process and technology to deliver software efficiently and safely.

DevOps