Interview: Marco dos Santos, CTO, Mollie
In this video, Renald Buter has a discussion with Marco dos Santos, CTO at Mollie, about the role of cloud and data in the process of scaling up the organization. During the session, Marco highlights different strategic topics that contribute to the expansion of this fast-growing fintech.
Expanding the Company
Mollie acknowledges that it needs to grow in both products as well as engineering to reach its international growth objectives. The company is expanding in multiple countries as well as along multiple product lines, including banking services, cash management and expenses management. By establishing two engineering locations, one in Amsterdam and one in Lisbon, the organization parallelized the development of its engineering teams, accelerating the hiring process and creating a decentralized operation at the same time Part of the engineering philosophy at Mollie is to bring engineers as close to the business problems as possible.
A Healthy Obsession With KPIs
At Mollie, you will find no middlemen to coordinate the projects. Marco has a healthy obsession with KPI’s. Engineering teams are aligned with a domain and are responsible for owning the success KPI’s, while an enablement team takes care of the shared infrastructure. Shipping faster and innovating faster are very important. Xebia has helped Mollie to kickstart the teams and to develop muscles. While golden paths and frameworks play a vital role in the operational success of the engineering teams, they also free up room for innovation and experimentation. One of the next frontiers for Mollie is to become a data-driven organization.
Establishing Data Literacy
Establishing data literacy within the entire organization is part of this process. This goes far beyond just training, as it also involves awareness and structure. Currently, Mollie is focusing on the development of its data capabilities, making a shift from reporting to predictive analytics. Part of this process is to improve the way that data is ingested, stored, and consumed. While data is being applied more broadly throughout the organization, the data platform will become more important to facilitate automated decision-making like risk management and automating manual processes.
