Mbanq engineering executive urges banks to build platform teams

Bank technology divisions could reduce duplicated infrastructure work and accelerate software delivery by creating dedicated platform teams, according to Igor Kostyuchenok, SVP of engineering at Mbanq. In an external Finextra opinion, he argued that standardized tooling can turn a task such as configuring a new service from a two-week effort into a two-hour one, while returning automation work “tenfold” across the organization.

Kostyuchenok said many bank technology organizations remain arranged around individual applications, with separate groups for core banking, payments, lending and reporting. In his view, that structure leaves each team responsible for its own deployment pipeline, monitoring setup and security approach, creating operational bottlenecks inside each unit.

He framed the problem through Matthew Skelton’s Team Topologies model, which classifies technology teams into four types: stream-aligned teams that deliver customer-facing value, enabling teams that build capability in other teams, complicated-subsystem teams that hold narrow specialist knowledge, and platform teams that provide shared internal infrastructure.

Automation as the operating lever

Kostyuchenok said banks often already have stream-aligned teams, but leave them without the internal platform or support needed to move faster. As a result, he argued, those teams build their own infrastructure and spend more time maintaining systems than delivering product improvements.

A platform team’s role, as described by Kostyuchenok, is to provide automated provisioning, standardized continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, self-service observability and security defaults. CI/CD pipelines automate the steps that move software from code changes through testing and into production, reducing manual handoffs and making releases more repeatable.

He said platform teams should treat internal engineering teams as customers. That means building services that developers choose because they are faster and more reliable than one-off alternatives, rather than relying on mandates alone.

Internal talent and authority

Kostyuchenok cautioned against assuming that platform capability must be imported from outside the bank. He said the engineers with the most relevant knowledge are often already inside the institution, including those who have maintained fragile deployment processes, built internal scripts or worked around manual procedures.

He argued that banks should identify those employees, assign them to a platform team and give the group a product manager, a defined mission and decision-making authority. External hiring may still be needed for some roles, he said, but the core team should come from within the organization because it understands the bank’s operational constraints.

Authority, in his argument, is engineering ownership rather than governance oversight. The platform team should deploy, maintain and improve shared infrastructure, while tracking adoption by other engineering teams as a primary measure of success.

Organization design

Kostyuchenok said a platform team placed inside a separate governance function is likely to underperform. He argued it should sit within engineering and maintain a direct relationship with the teams it serves.

He also identified enabling teams as part of the model. These teams do not build shared infrastructure, he said, but work alongside stream-aligned groups to teach platform usage, write documentation, run workshops and reduce adoption friction. In one example, he said three enabling-team members could raise the effectiveness of 30 engineers across five stream-aligned teams.

Finextra labels the contribution as external content supplied by its author without editing, reflecting the author’s views. Kostyuchenok’s broader conclusion was that banks which lack platform teams may continue hiring engineers to solve problems that automation could address, while struggling to retain staff frustrated by slow or fragile infrastructure.

This story draws on original reporting from Finextra Research.