Beach Finance

Beach is a savings and investments platform: money, in a regulated industry, where the technology and the regulatory obligations had both grown past the point of being handled part-time or ad hoc. What the company needed was senior ownership. Someone to hold the engineering direction and the security posture, and to answer for both in the board room.

The remit was to act as CTO and CISO on a fractional basis. Set the technical strategy, design and build the platform, put the controls in place, and make the result something a regulator, an auditor and a customer could all trust.

What the work involved

The early weeks went on learning the business before changing anything. Where the risk actually sat, what the team already did well, and which decisions were being deferred because nobody owned them.

From there the work ran on three fronts. The platform itself was a ground-up build spanning the customer app, the staff portal, the APIs between them and the AWS infrastructure underneath, integrated with WealthKernel for the investment rails. Around it sat a technology roadmap the leadership team could plan against, and the governance a regulated financial service is expected to have: identity and access control, audit logging and monitoring, data protection, and security reporting the board can read without a translator.

Designing the architecture and owning the compliance posture turned out to be the same job. Every technical decision, from how environments are isolated to who can access what and what gets logged, is also a security decision. Cheaper to make them once, together, than to retrofit one onto the other.

The best technical decisions are the ones that, written down, read like common sense.

Where it stands

Beach now has a clear technical direction, a security posture that stands up to scrutiny, and a leadership team that can make confident calls about technology without needing to be engineers themselves. The engagement continues on a fractional basis: a steady hand, a few days a month, accountable for the two things a financial platform can’t outsource, its architecture and its trustworthiness.