Leading a Global Fintech Development Team to Deliver Exceptional Client Experiences
As Head of Digital Experience and Innovation at a leading B2B FinTech firm, I lead our team in building innovative, customisable products that fit the diverse needs of our clients. In more than two decades since joining the firm, I’ve led the development of many products – including digital onboarding, trading and market analytics platforms and services – used by clients ranging from fintech start-ups to large-scale brokerages and wealth management firms.
Throughout this 20-plus-year journey of driving automation and efficiency alongside our clients’ digital transformations, I’ve navigated our firm through numerous challenges—from aligning teams and managing resources to staying ahead of the rapidly evolving digital landscape.
Today, I’m sharing five core principles I use to lead my team of engineers, developers and designers toward productivity, innovation, and positive day-to-day interpersonal experiences.
1. Encourage Continuous Learning
We often describe our team having the energy of a start-up with the experience of an established firm. We bring a blend of entrepreneurial spirit and decades of experience to help firms grow their businesses. While I joined ViewTrade early in my professional career, within these walls, I honed my skills across multiple domains in FinTech, including product development, digital strategy, and team leadership. From mastering the intricacies of UI/UX design to gaining expertise in agile methodologies, cloud technologies, and data-driven decision-making, my journey at ViewTrade has allowed me to evolve into a well-rounded leader capable of delivering innovative solutions tailored to the unique needs of our global clients. I am a large proponent of actively seeking out opportunities for continued education – I have completed several courses from Harvard Business School and MIT Sloan on utilising generative AI tools for Digital Transformation, Design Thinking, Strategy Execution, Disruptive Strategy and more. Similarly, I encourage my team to pursue learning opportunities whenever possible, offering incentives such as tuition reimbursement for courses that support professional development. When your team is in the loop on the latest developments across emerging technologies, they can apply what they’ve learned in academic settings to enhance your firm’s offerings.
2. Pick the Top Talent – Regardless of Location
Our team’s hiring process focuses on recruiting top-notch developers, regardless of their location. First and foremost, we look for individuals with a strong willingness to learn, adapt to new technologies and deliver results that contribute to our clients’ success. We handpick each of our developers, ensuring they match our team’s core skillsets and values. This skills-based approach has resulted in highly efficient teams. Our flexible, remote model makes sense for our firm. Our clients and prospects are located around the world, so why should our internal team be any different?
3. Prioritise an Open Dialogue
Part of my role is to facilitate open communication channels between our front- and back-end engineers, designers and our sales team, who are working to sell our products and services to clients and prospects around the world. My team is distributed across various regions, including the US, Europe and Asia. Therefore, I facilitate regular cross-functional team meetings to ensure constant communication about ongoing projects, product development and customer/market feedback. Our committed team also adapts their schedule to ensure we collaborate seamlessly across time zones. We work to achieve shared goals and KPIs and aim to foster a culture of transparency and support one another every step of the way. The time and effort placed into effective communication ensures round-the-clock progress across verticals, ultimately allowing us to deliver better results while enhancing overall efficiency and effectiveness.
4. Create a Feedback Loop with Clients
Given our broad client base, our team strives towards building customisable products that cater to a wide range of design preferences, language requirements and other specifications. Since we build for and sell to businesses rather than directly to end users, our ability to iterate and quickly adjust our products based on our clients’ requirements is critical. By implementing an ongoing feedback loop, our client base and our design team benefit: we know what to improve and focus on, and firms get the differentiating functionality they (and their end users) can derive the most value from. We’ve added features such as colour scheme changes and language translation, including full support for right-to-left languages, as a direct result of client feedback, and we continue to keep an open mind towards future suggestions for improving our offerings. We are currently developing a solution to provide our clients with full product customisation in an intuitive, code-free environment, enabling them to tailor their experience seamlessly and meet their unique needs without technical barriers.
5. Promote Innovation (With a Healthy Dose of Caution)
Our design approach follows current and up-to-date technology principles, ensuring our clients’ intuitiveness and ease. In our quest to implement the latest trends in trading tech into our products, we’re currently exploring plans to introduce more AI tools to enhance our platforms. Personally, I am cautiously optimistic about Artificial Intelligence (AI). While I encourage my team to stay on the cutting edge of emerging technology, I am equally sure to be transparent about expressing my concerns about the oversaturation of AI in the market and the need for careful selection of tools and solutions that genuinely add value. When leading a team, I’ve found it essential to balance a full-on, brazen attitude towards emerging tech that can give us a leg up and exercising extreme caution to avoid unnecessary risk for our and our client’s businesses.
Wrapping Up
The cross-functional nature of my role overseeing the delivery of digital products and services, as well as our company’s global scale of operations, bring an additional level of complexity to my position. However, these aspects of the role have also allowed me to gain a deep level of technology insight and have equipped me with the tools as a leader to help drive our product strategy forward. Alongside my team and my peers, we have enjoyed a level of success far beyond what we ever imagined possible when our firm was founded in 1999.
To learn more about the work we’re doing over at ViewTrade – the force that fuels digital finance – visit us at viewtrade.com.
By Sergei Lishchenko, Digital Experience Technology Services, ViewTrade
