Building a Challenger Bank

In 2018, the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), as part of its digital strategy planning, launched Mettle, a solution for sole traders and small businesses to manage finances, combining a current account with invoicing, payment chasing and bookkeeping capabilities.

The initiative for the challenger bank came in response to an increasing competitive landscape in that market, a strong customer demand in a generally underserved market and RBS’ general appetite to innovate outside of their core market.

RBS was keen to get some external expertise in building the platform in order to drive speed and performance of the final product. esynergy was selected as technology partner due to its ability to really understand RBS’ requirements for the combination of top talent, speed and cultural fit.

A pilot version was launched to the market in less than 12 months, providing SMEs with an innovative, end-to-end solution, that allows them to make better decisions and ultimately run their businesses more successfully. The state-of-the art platform scales with an increasing amount of users, is highly secure and available as well as allows for straightforward monitoring of the overall system health.