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 had 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 putting product development on hold
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 was 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: How Zopa led a full replatform of a mature, actively-developed React Native app into a predominantly native product without pausing delivery. Neil will go into the leadership decisions, the technical approach, and what it takes to manage large-scale cultural change when the target keeps moving.
Farzad Sedaghatbin, ex-CTO at Blu: What it takes to build a bank when the mobile app is the only product. Farzad will cover how architecture, release process, and team structure had to evolve at each stage of Blu's growth from zero to 4 million users, the decisions that didn't survive scale, and the mistakes made along the way. All from the trenches, not theory.
Discussion Themes
Architecture, Process and Team Structure at Each Stage of Growth
How each of these had to change as Blu Bank scaled, and what the decisions looked like from the inside. Farzad will cover what he changed, what broke, and what he got wrong.
Lessons From the Trenches
The mistakes made along the way building a mobile-only bank from zero. What Farzad would do differently, and what held up better than expected.
Replatforming a Live App Without Stopping Delivery
How Zopa migrated a five-year-old React Native app, built by up to 30 engineers, to a predominantly native codebase while the product kept shipping. Neil will cover how this was done without putting product development on hold.
Leading Large-Scale Technical and Cultural Change
Neil's talk is less about the technology and more about the leadership side: what it takes to drive fundamental change in a large engineering team when the target keeps moving.
Details
Speakers:
Neil Sheppard, Head of Mobile Engineering at Zopa Bank
Farzad Sedaghatbin, ex-CTO at Blu, current CTO at Kixy
Event:
Held at Vonage's offices on 8th September from 18:00
Networking from 18:00 to 18:45
Presentations start at 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
RecWorks builds communities for CTOs, engineers, and future leaders, connecting talent, ideas, and opportunity across tech.