Overview
CTO Craft Con: Fintech is an intimate, community-centered gathering for engineering leaders in London. It brings together senior technology leaders from fintechs, banks, and regulated platforms to navigate AI, compliance, and delivery friction. The event focuses on sharing practical operating stories and fostering peer relationships for decision-making.
Schedule
Women in Tech Breakfast
A staple at CTO Craft Con events, this is a space for women in technology leadership to come together, share experiences, and build meaningful connections with others who get it.
The Inevitability of Tech Debt
Every fintech carries it. The decisions made at speed in year one, the shortcuts taken to hit a compliance deadline, the architecture that made sense before you scaled. The question isn’t whether you have tech debt. It’s whether you’re leading it or it’s leading you. Harry Jell has co-founded and scaled a regulated credit card business from scratch. He’ll share what it actually looks like to manage rewrites and accumulating debt inside a business where regulators, investors, and customers all ha
Building 10x Organisations Using Modern Productivity Metrics
10x developers may be a myth, but 10x organisations are very real, as proven by the influential study performed in the 1980s, ‘The Coding War Games.’ This session will take a detailed, granular look at the barriers to productivity developers face today and modern approaches for removing them. You’ll learn about the history of productivity theory, and how previous practices have influenced our current understanding. DevOps and Platform Engineering philosophy is clearly converging on developer exp
Your Architecture Is Your Ceiling
AI is brilliant when helping with your newest services and sometimes next-to-useless in your oldest. That’s not a tooling problem, and no amount of prompt engineering will make it go away. The reason is structural. AI leverage depends on loose coupling – twice over. Boundaries contain the blast radius of a mistake, but a well-bounded domain is the natural unit of AI comprehension. Where those boundaries are missing, AI can understand your system but you can’t trust its changes. In a regulated en
The Parts That Stay Human
AI-first development has fundamentally changed both halves of your engineering organisation. First, Hywel will examine your role as a leader, focusing on the aspects that should never be automated away. Second, he will look at the shifting reality for your engineers as they transition from individual contributors to architects and system orchestrators. Join us to learn what makes the difference between high and low expertise with AI for engineers, what areas leaders must lean into, and how to em
One Fintech Platform, New Wrapper: Extending Core Infrastructure Into Cash ISAs
For its first decade, Flagstone was a single-product company: one platform, £20bn in assets under administration. Then we targeted the Cash ISA, a £360bn market largely untouched by innovation since its creation. This talk covers what it takes to launch a second product on top of a platform you can’t afford to break: the architectural trade-offs, the constraints that shaped our technical decisions, and the specific bets we made to support growth from £20bn to £50bn. If you’re scaling a fintech b
The New Bottleneck: Why Verification Is the Real Competitive Edge in AI-Assisted Engineering
AI has solved the wrong problem. Individual developer velocity is up, but company velocity isn’t keeping pace. Teams using AI open roughly twice as many pull requests. Review time
Women in Tech Breakfast
A staple at CTO Craft Con events, this is a space for women in technology leadership to come together, share experiences, and build meaningful connections with others who get it.