How domain expertise and rapid deployment help drive revenue

Written by Adam Kinder - Co-Founder of G&F

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Technical delivery and integration speed can make or break commercial partnerships - especially in industries like fintech, payments and digital banking. At Gathered & Found, we help many FS clients seamlessly integrate complex APIs and onboard new banking and technology partners faster than they initially thought possible.

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Here, we break down how our rapid deployment model, coupled with the deployment of domain experts and specialists, reduces our customers integration time, unlocks new commercial opportunities, and delivers real customer value.

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Integrating Complex APIs and Third-Party Partners

Many of our clients operate in highly regulated environments where integrating new banking partners is a critical aspect of their continued success. It isn’t just about writing code, it’s about ensuring compliance, security, performance, and driving the entire business forward.

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Many common challenges often arise:

• Complex and poorly documented APIs
• Differing authentication and security standards
• Multi-stakeholder alignment and requirements
• Regulatory understanding
• Pressure to activate commercial relationships quickly

Most of the time, FTE engineering teams are already dialled in on critical feature builds and product development work, meaning the addition of a new integration can cause significant delays across the wider team. There is also often a lack of experience within the team in how to handle complex integrations, whilst continuing to deliver critical tickets and keep up to speed.

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G&F Solution: A Rapid Deployment Model utilising Domain-driven, Integration Experts

At Gathered & Found, we’ve developed a deployment model that’s fast, repeatable, and designed for integration-heavy environments. The key elements to our approach include:

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• Dedicated Integration Squads

Cross-functional G&F Squads are built to hit the ground running, with handpicked engineers from the G&F ecosystem, architects, and product experts who have been there and done it, countless times over. And more importantly, our teams understand the upcoming challenges and how to navigate these challenges before they arise. These teams serve as a technical bridge that don’t need to be hired for on a full-time basis, meaning your internal teams can focus on delivering your roadmap, knowing that your integrations are in safe hands.

• Domain Expertise

We don’t just deploy generic developers - we deploy experts who understand the banking and fintech ecosystem and that have delivered multiple complex integrations in the past. Whether it’s highly compliant regulatory APIs, real-time payment gateways, or Open Banking layers, our teams know the landscape and add value from Day One.

This domain knowledge removes ambiguity, accelerates alignment with third-parties, and drastically reduces the friction often seen in technical onboarding.

• Reusable Patterns and Playbooks

Over time, we’ve built a Playbook of proven patterns, checklists, and integration techniques. Whilst not every integration and technical environment is the same, we have a ready-to-use Playbook we bring to these engagements that helps accelerate the entire process and that removes downtime and non-productivity.

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The Commercial Impact

Faster integrations mean faster time-to-revenue. Whether it is a key additional feature that will allow your clients to offer new currencies to their customers, or meeting industry standard regulations, having strong integration partners can be a huge value-add and allow your commercial teams to take the right products to market, at the right time.

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Being able to add new partnerships and features to your portfolio and adding strong product offerings to your customers can be the difference between success and failure. And being highly proactive in adhering to regulatory changes will instil huge confidence across the industry, confirming that you are a serious engineering business and take regulatory change seriously.

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When partnering with G&F as Integration Partners, our clients have benefited from:

• Accelerated go-live for new banking partnerships
• Early access to key features and payment rails
• Better Customer experience and stronger commercial relationships
• Increased internal team capacity: we handle the heavy lifting so your in-house engineers can focus on core product
• Stronger market reputation: quickly responding to regulatory changes and being ahead of the curve instils both customer and client confidence

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Commercial vs Technology Relationships

In addition to the integrations themselves, we also help our partners to improve internal relationships between commercial and technology teams. There are many similar patterns we find at the majority of FS businesses. Many of these are also purely circumstantial and natural, and not some form of personal vendetta against their peers.

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Some of these include:

• Lack of visibility on progress and technical advancements
• Lack of knowledge on how long complex technical implementations actually take
• Poor communication channels and no key relationship owner
• Disconnected vision on what the business actually needs
• Poor time estimations on delivery

There often isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach here, but by breaking down existing barriers and getting all parts of the business speaking, it is amazing how quickly commercial and technology relationships improve. We do this via workshops, conducting stakeholder sessions and even things as basic as getting everyone in the same room to talk about their experiences! This is something that should be at the core of every CxO’s mind, and can be a differentiator in making your entire organisation work smoothly.

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Let's wrap this up!

API integrations are something that can be a game-changer for many businesses, as well as a fundamental industry requirement. Having the ability to complete them quickly and successfully, is an even bigger accelerator and value-add.

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At Gathered & Found, we understand the importance of these initiatives and what they mean to your journey, vision and roadmap. By combining deep domain expertise with our repeatable, scalable rapid deployment model, we help our clients move faster, integrate smarter, and unlock value earlier.

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Whether you’re expanding your banking partnerships, adding payment providers, or launching a new embedded finance product, we’ve got the playbook to help you succeed. And the best part of the G&F partnership? When we have completed the mission, we scale things down. Say "goodbye" to unfair contractual agreements that deliver little to no value.

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