Accenture’s Fintech Innovation Lab initiative is an accelerator programme designed to put the best fintech start ups in front of potential banking customers and investors – we interview those that made it to the final.
Company: Cutover
CBR: Describe your solution in technical terms.
Cutover: "Cutover consists of three components. The first is a collaborative planning environment for large, varied distributed teams to plan and rehearse their critical real-time enterprise events.
"The second is a real-time mission control hub that helps to choreograph the live event via SMS and email. It also provides live dashboards to stakeholders to give them status without disturbing the people doing the work.
"The final component is a black box system of record, which provides a forensic audit trail of the event for regulators and learning. It’s all accessed through the browser and combines the technical components of a scheduling engine with task management, real-time tracking and integrated communications."
CBR: What problem does it solve/opportunity does it create?
Cutover: "Technology leads in banks are presented with a "rift valley" lacking useful solutions when they look to support their teams to tackle the intensively risky point of implementation of new technology. There are great platforms to support the ‘Build the Bank’ side in crafting new technology, and great platforms on the ‘Run the Bank’ side for managing technology operations, but at the point of transitioning technology from the ‘build’ to the ‘run’ side, teams are left to coordinate this with spreadsheets, phone calls and emails."
"We saw a big gap when running these implementations ourselves and wanted to plug that gap to support what we call the "human bridges" – large, varied teams of individuals – that many organisations rely upon to deal with these risks in getting critical events across the line without causing incidents in live operations."
"The Cutover solution is a specialised tool to orchestrate teams in these high-risk periods. These include making changes to core banking systems, the launch phase of major projects, major incidents, disaster recovery testing and invocation, event management and product launch."
"Banking system outages can be costly and can also affect customer perceptions. Cutover aims bring people together through a system of engagement that enables communications, collaboration and teamwork in real-time, helping to reduce risk and avoid errors."
CBR: Why is it unique?
Cutover: "We are the only platform that provides a focus on real-time critical corporate change events and the human choreography of these. Providing a mission control capability that operates in hours, minutes and seconds, together with integrated SMS and email, offers a capability that safeguards these critical events."
"People today resort to spreadsheets, email, conference calls and teams of coordinators because this is all that they have available to them."
CBR: What language is it built in?
Cutover: "Cutover was built using the Ruby on Rails framework."
CBR: What platform is it built on?
Cutover: "We use the Ubuntu Operating System and PostgreSQL, hosted on a secure, scalable AWS (Amazon Web Services) platform."
CBR: Which best describes your technology: It is a cloud solution. It is a SaaS solution. It is a third platform solution.
Cutover: "Software as a Service."
CBR: Describe the culture of your company.
Cutover: "The culture of Cutover is based on two core aspects: our value of getting stuff done is core to what we believe in. Secondly, the culture is based on sharing: making sure we share and collaborate well."
