In software development there are few enabling factors that can boost the productivity and well being of team. You could sum up everything into 2 things:
- Hire best available talent around
- Trust your talent
Trust is something that enables innovation while maintaining feel of responsibility. Trust towards your talented hires allows them to feel appreciated and at the same time responsible for delivery. In many ways Red Badger works exactly this way - hires amazing people, puts them into teams and provides autonomy in making decisions regarding how things should be done. Pick best available tools, combine with the modern agile methodologies and lean approach, do real life user research, test and deliver actual product.
One of the natural limiting factors is always budget. There is X amount of money approved to spend. Within the budget every spending should generally be approved by PM (plus whatever extra people involved into accounting of spendings). There is also certain amount of paperwork involved for bookkeeping.
The way current banking system is setup doesn’t allow much flexibility or transparency. There is company bank card that can be used for approved spendings. It is hard however to register these spendings to a certain team or project. All of that is usually done manually if at all. There is also no way of specifying a budget per team and providing everyone on that team flexible access to that budget, with automatic accountability and bookkeeping done as you spend.
Things can change in a very near future.
There is a new wave of banking startups offering things impossible earlier with conventional banks. Software is eating the world - disrupting existing conventions and rules. Financial businesses are one of few large institutes that are waiting for big change to happen. Mostly in terms of usability, transparency and flexibility to end users. In 2016 you’d expect to be able to handle your banking from your smart watch. Some banking apps indeed enable you to do that. But speed of change is so slow that it will take another decade for them to catch up with the pace of an average tech startup.
Mondo is one interesting example in particular. They are offering 3rd party API for building your own apps on top of their bank platform. No more bank owning closed eco system of apps. Open API platform for developers to use. It is under heavy development right now, but already at this stage it allows access to quite a few things normally under heavy locks in a conventional banking world.
Mondo API can do a lot, but right now they are listening to what else could be achieved with open API. We are going to combine idea of open banking API with the idea of a company enabling autonomy of a team.
A single bank account is split into virtual bank accounts with allocated budget. Each team gets a virtual bank account, bank cards and a budget to spend. Each team member is enabled to use this budget when feels necessary. Everyone can also see how much money is already spent, how much is left, and every single transaction made by team members.
In web development it is often required to get licenses to various cloud services. Most likely team will be able to communicate this within, but even if not, types of transactions on the current project can quickly answer if a particular license was already acquired.
This also works cross team. If multiple teams are buying same software, this can be flagged to someone in the company responsible for spendings, and a discount can be requested for multiple licenses. Thanks to the metadata for each transaction, this could even be done semi-automatically.
Also if you are the company selling services, you could get notified (thanks to the same metadata) that a certain company bought multiple accounts and a discount could be offered.
List of available accounts and licenses across company can be hard to maintain. This also could be automated based on transactions metadata. Once license or account is acquired, you could update company wide list and potentially even put expiration dates with reminders to renew subscription.
Each spending within a team could trigger a web hook, which in turn can trigger any kind of notifications. Your team Slack channel could get notified about every spending that is happening within a team. Accountant and CEO could get personal notifications on spendings larger than £X000.
Instead of constantly asking for permission, this advocates a different approach. It goes like “go do it, and be responsible for your decisions”.
Official Mondo API documentation is available and you can start building apps today with what is out there. API is obviously under heavy development and will evolve. Mondo is also not the only banking startup right now - pretty sure there are more coming out in very near future.
Mondo API allows you to:
- List available accounts of the user
- Retrieve available balance for each account
- List history of transactions with all the metadata
- Annotate transactions
- Attach files to transactions
- Create extra feed items
- Create web hooks for events
Web hooks are probably the biggest enabler at the moment. They will allow you to capture events real time and invoke any sort of logic based on type of transactions.