Location of the development team

I’ve been reading up on Dozens/Project Imagine and have come across this article:

https://www.bankingtech.com/2018/06/uk-challenger-bank-project-imagine-preps-for-launch/

This caught my eye:

The CEO tells us they are in the process of recruiting its 14th engineer in Ukraine, where the team is building a fully in-house orchestration system. The core banking system will come further down the line.

I was wondering if development was still in Ukraine and if anything could be shared about location of different teams, international focus and so forth?

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From this post here: https://www.instagram.com/p/BrxqE32BKJZ/

Looks like they are based in central London to me. Not sure, don’t know London too well however.

The dozens team itself is based in London and we are in the process of organising some community events where we can invite you to come and say hello and see us hard at work :slight_smile:

You are right, however, that our super-powered development team is based in Ukraine … but considering how long we spend with them on virtual meetings they could just as well be sitting in our offices (though there are a LOT of them so I’m not sure where we’d put them).

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My take on this is that it’s not necessarily important ‘where’ they are: what is important is that they’re not so clever they lack common sense and practicality. My initial interest in Dozens/Imagine was due to the unique perspective of encouraging/facilitating good money management and opening up to a much wider group the chance to earn more by saving. This is, thus far, a unique ‘marketing approach’. However, no-matter the app is new and the systems still in beta testing Dozens app only verification method is poor, not just slightly buggy but seriously lacking. Email communication is insecure ( since iOS 12 even Apple has made the implementation of secure (encrypted email) very difficult to achieve. Never-the-less until the process of verification of an individual’s identity is completed the app does not facilitate direct, secure communication with Dozens.The process of verification has very little information within the app to familiarize the applicant about what to expect and how to manage it. Many who elect this will already be familiar with other fintech approaches. I know I was wrong footed by the indication " you will make a short video" as I (also) expected to have to make a cringe-worthy selfie audio to the gist of ‘I’m applying for a *** a/c’ - I was practically finished with that when the visual prompts came up to speak the numbers indicated. I am also of an age where I would no more make a selfie voluntarily than run down the road naked; hence just the sight of myself on my own phone is traumatic. I think this process has been rushed to market and is a long way from being reliable. Remember First Impressions Count. If this one off process has not yet been optimized, a one time event which tends to influence the potential life long customer, then what to expect for the more banking/wealth creating parts? Many people criticize both Monzo and Starling’s approaches to on-boarding their customers. Many people criticize Anne’s habitual approach to whetting our appetites for up-coming developments with “soon”. Well, what she definitely did get right was two-fold: she avoided the temptation of playing to the hipsters and millennials. Instead she cultivated a more conservative and more wide in appeal offering (older and retired individuals after all have the greatest financial clout) but, moreover, since she uniquely so far as I am aware, has a background in coding and digital banking ensured that the on-boarding process was slick and painless. It was more impressive than what followed but it made a very solid impression. But this IT offering is unimpressive as it clearly says “we are jumping the gun” "we expect you to bear with us while we iron out the bugs (insufficient in-house-testing) and be so keen on your 5% that you will bear with us. I’m not sure how to take that. I already turned down out of hand N26. I have both Monzo and Starling yet I’m not intrinsically a collector of fintech offerings. But my personal experience of the on-boarding experience of this venture makes me feel fully vindicated for being cynical. It does not feel IT professional while it does feel like the first offering that is FINtech rather than finTECH. But where does that leave us?

Ukraine’s a great place for a dev team. Very on-the-ball there. Cheaper but just as capable (if not more so) devs compared to London. Quite a few fast-growing SaaS companies are based or have development in Ukraine.

On a different note, Lviv is well worth a visit. Beautiful city with friendly people and a great coffee culture, and a big variety of shops and restaurants.

Could you please break up long posts a little? I don’t disagree with a lot of what you were saying, but reading that was pretty hard going.

Reformatted below for others reading it. (apologies if the way I’ve reformatted the post changes the points of emphasis you were aiming for)

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