Building and Rebuilding: Mobile Engineering Leadership in Fintech - Zopa / Blu

Overview

Explore how mobile engineering leaders build, scale, and rebuild financial products without stopping the clock, losing users, or breaking what already works. 🚀

Company

Zopa Bank (Neil Sheppard, Head of Mobile Engineering)

• Zopa's mobile app has been in production for five years, with up to 30 engineers working on it at its peak.
• Built entirely in React Native, the app needed to be migrated to a predominantly native codebase without halting product development.
• The challenge was as much cultural as technical: leading a large team through fundamental change while continuing to ship.

Blu Bank / Kixy (Farzad Sedaghatbin, CTO)

• Farzad led Blu Bank from zero to 4 million users as CTO between 2020 and 2023; the bank has since grown to 20 million users.
• Blu is a mobile-only bank: no branches, no web app. The mobile app is the entire product.
• Scaling meant changing architecture, release process, and team structure at every stage of growth while keeping a live financial product running for millions of users.

What Each Speaker Will Unpack

Neil Sheppard, Head of Mobile Engineering at Zopa Bank:

• Discusses how Zopa led a full replatform of a mature, actively-developed React Native app into a predominantly native product without pausing delivery. He will cover leadership decisions, technical approaches, and managing large-scale cultural change.

Farzad Sedaghatbin, ex-CTO at Blu:

• Shares insights on building a bank when the mobile app is the only product. He will discuss how architecture, release processes, and team structures evolved at each stage of Blu's growth, including decisions that didn't survive scale and mistakes made along the way.

Discussion Themes

• Architecture, Process, and Team Structure at Each Stage of Growth:
  • How these elements changed as Blu Bank scaled, including what worked and what broke.
• Lessons From the Trenches:
  • Mistakes made while building a mobile-only bank from zero and what Farzad would do differently.
• Replatforming a Live App Without Stopping Delivery:
  • How Zopa migrated a five-year-old React Native app to a predominantly native codebase while continuing product delivery.
• Leading Large-Scale Technical and Cultural Change:
  • Neil's focus on the leadership side of driving fundamental change in a large engineering team.

Details

• Speakers:
  • Neil Sheppard, Head of Mobile Engineering at Zopa Bank
  • Farzad Sedaghatbin, ex-CTO at Blu, current CTO at Kixy
• Event Location:
  • Vonage, 15 Bonhill St, London EC2A 4DN, UK
• Date:
  • 8th September
• Networking:
  • 18:00 to 18:45
• Presentations Start:
  • 18:45
• Sponsored by:
  • Novoda and Vonage
  • Novoda is a mobile engineering consultancy helping companies scale world-class apps. Vonage powers communications for apps used by millions every day.
• Organised by:
  • RecWorks, building communities for CTOs, engineers, and future leaders, connecting talent, ideas, and opportunity across tech.