theidol.com is a disruptive technology company based in Penrith, Cumbria, on the edge of the stunning Lake District National Park, providing solutions to the FinTech and financial services sector, offering a partnership that delivers more than a piece of software. theidol.com are an authorised intermediary and provide their service to numerous household comparison sites. Their highly skilled cross-functional teams work successfully to deliver the very best solutions.

The disruptive technology company selected Godel as their nearshore software development partner in 2021 to help them succeed and deliver change at pace.

In this episode of The Godel POD, our host Sally Jones, Service Delivery Manager at Godel is joined by Craig Morrison, Strategic Partnership Director at theIdol.com to to discuss the journey of our partnership, as well as cultivating innovation internally and with a partner.

This is an edited transcript, for more conversations on the latest in tech, subscribe to The Godel POD on Podbean and Spotify. Podcast jingle provided by the Hideout YouthZone. 

Podcast transcript 

Sally Jones: Hi, I’m Sally. Welcome back to The Godel POD. I’m here with Craig if you’d like to introduce yourself.

Craig Morrison: I’m Craig Morrison, strategic partnership director at theIdol.com. We are a FinTech financial services business based up in Penrith and the northwest, been around for 25 years this year wholly owned by legal general, the borders and corners in 2016 and over the last few years have grown massively. So thanks for having me.

Sally Jones: Great. Thanks for coming on. And you’ve be working with Godel for around three years now. I think it was August 2021. When we started the partnership, obviously it’s a strange time to start a partnership in the middle of COVID, lockdown How did you find that kind of transition into working with a partner I believe it was the first time you’ve worked with a partner.

Craig Morrison: When we started our relationship with you guys COVID had just hit, we had about 50 employees and normal, tiring ground I guess, for recruitment was very much in the northwest. So as a business and organisation, we were, I guess in a lucky position to look at people local to Penrith and the northwest Carlisle, etc. When COVID came who work working powers changed. Great news for us but equally loads of barriers. Getting developers became really tricky in the UK. Finding local talent became quite tricky because you could suddenly be working in Penrith work for a company in London. So we found the job market quite difficult at that time.

Through some relationships that we had, that you also had we knew of the Godel brand go to relationship and we reached out to you at the time and started talking about what you could offer us what how we could work in partnership, I guess. So in terms of the three and a half years, it seems to have gone by in a blur. But we’ve been really impressed and excited by the relationship. Great. I’m sure we’ll get into the minutes.

Sally Jones: When you were looking for a partner. Was there anything in particular that you were looking for in a partner? What What made you choose Godel?

Craig Morrison: So at the time, some of the challenges around software development. We absolutely needed full stack developers front end development. We had inherited relationship on a tech stack that wasn’t our core tech stack offering. So we needed a way of augmenting some of the support and some of the services that we could offer our partners. So when we started speaking to godel, Chris at the time, we identified that you have the necessary development resources, the EDC testing resources that we needed in our business to effectively take some of the projects we’re working on at an accelerated rate and also ensure that we could take some of those inherited projects in house and continue on supporting them so we were able to do both of them. So job well done I guess from that perspective.

Sally Jones: I think something that we’re all always aware of it Godel is making sure that the nearshore team members feel really integrated into the partner’s business. I think that’s something we’ve done really well in our partnership and I think that we’ve done a good job of making sure that we have travel and we have that kind of informal communication with team members. What do you think worked well in the partnership?

Craig Morrison: Lots of things have worked well, obviously it’s you Sally. So, first of all, I guess we have made a real, conscious effort to have an augmented solution to the relationship by augmented we meet not having one individual called squads, that using idol squads, and we’ve got eight of them now, with a scattering of Gode Developers EDCs occasionally testers, while other resource we need to deliver some of the projects. So that’s that’s been point number one. We originally looked to try and deploy Godel colleagues in at least scores of two or to go on people’s press squad. And more recently, we’ve had conversations around actually, the breadth and depth of the relationship we actually don’t need to do that anymore. You know, so we’ve been able to deploy Godel into our squads and feel comfortable that they’re not going to be alone by themselves feeling stranded, isolated. So that’s really encouraging. What we’ve also then done is we’ve gone off to Poland, to see you guys, seen how you operate, meet with people face to face. And we’ve also had, three occasions now in those three and a half years, where we’ve had Godel Developers and the team for over to Penrith, again, to have that face to face relationship. Everyone that is on Teams these days, that’s just a way of life unfortunately.

I’m old school, I still believe that you need to have a face to face relationship. You really develop and deepen those relationships individually across the team, you understand who you’re dealing with. It just helps have, more direct conversations and easier conversations. And I think if you put all that into practice, we measure and monitor the health of the squads we get lots of feedback. You guys give us lots of feedback about the health of the partnership generally sees a green which is great. And the feedback we get from your staff. The feel part of furniture which is a nice term. That’s the really thoroughly enjoy getting the Cumbrian dialect from various people in the team. And they generally feel like they’re part of the Idol, we certainly view them as part of the Idol. So we don’t really differentiate a Godel colleague to an Idol colleague.

Sally Jones: You can definitely tell and I think it helps that all of the Godel team members do have a voice within the idol so I think you really listen to their feedback, key value, their feedback and their experience working with other partners. So I think that really helps to make sure that they’re integrated, even though they are a couple of hours away. How do you cultivate innovation internally and also with the Godel team, I guess it ties into what we’re talking about or giving people a voice.

Craig Morrison: So we approach innovation in lots of different ways. From a technology perspective, we’ve recently created a function called labs. So that looks after our technological innovation within the idle. So giving some of our colleagues freedom to explore new tech, new ways of working, and ultimately understand if it’s going to work or fail. What we try and do as a business is have innovation throughout everyone’s we give people the ability to do some self development. We give them the ability to challenge how we do things, to innovation to help me be a big bang, it can be simply a change to a process to try and make something bit more efficient. It could be introducing a new feature a new proposition, new ways of working, so we’d really try and encourage that across everyone. Within the idle. And if everyone’s got an idea, or have a view, we really encourage them to kind of bring that out. This is probably evidence really well within some of the aforementioned visits.

So we’ve done a number of hackathons. We’ve always involved Google colleagues and all those hackathons. Because we understand the experience that they could bring from previous deployments with Godel, with different companies, maybe in different markets, different ways of doing things, different ways of working. So that approach along with the Google culture, along with Godel ways of working, we’d be foolish not to learn and listen to what works in other areas. And those hackathon events. You’re really, for our perspective, epitomize the whole idea of innovation. So we get together for a few days, and look at problem statements, particular areas of our market, or partners or just internally coupled with a variety of solutions. We actually have a hackathon this week. I’ve got a hackathon with Godel Yes, it would be with us for three months.

Sally Jones: Yeah. And they’re already coming over to the UK because they’re exciting for them. So how do you transform technology in a highly regulated industry?

Craig Morrison: Fantastic question. So we’ve got decades of experience in the space. We understand the markets really well. We understand the problems that people are trying to resolve, we understand the approach that we need to take in a regulated space, particularly in financial services are very heavily regulated by the FCA. And I guess that’s the approach you take to building a proposition if you understand the common areas from a compliance perspective that you need to look out for you build that into your proposition in the kind of the foundations and that gives you a really solid platform to move from. So in terms of how we approach tech, it’s all about the decades of experience, the building of solutions which are fit for purpose, and once they’re built, we then find that we’re able to deal with changes to regulation coming from the regulator and understanding what the partners need in order to be compliant.

Sally Jones: And are there any key technology trends you seeing at the moment that are impacting?

Craig Morrison: There’s definitely two trends that we are seeing talked obviously about AI, interesting I went to a Godel talk earlier on this month. Is it artificial intelligence or is it assisted intelligence? I’m not going to get into the lins and outs of that today. But we certainly see it in its infancy. I think that the next five years could be really exciting times, I guess, for AI. There’s lots of use cases, very much around efficiency gains, and very much around propositional enhancements. But we are finding that there’s a lot of talk and it’s how much of that is in practice being utilised. So we’re certainly watching the space with bated breath, understanding what’s happening. And it’s moving in such a piece that you know, what we talk about tomorrow might be redundant in a month’s time, because it’s moving that fast.

So AI is absolutely something that we are focused on, then machine learning, you know, machine learning in a regulated space, doing something with lots of data we see lots of use cases around machine learning in the dynamic pricing space, and customisable space where you’re gathering lots of information on the customer and you’re really customizing either a quote or a proposition or product specific to their needs. And we think machine learning has already been deployed that guys, we think, they’re the two areas that are quite exciting right now.

Sally Jones: It is exciting. And as you say it’s moving fast, but it feels like everyone’s learning together, which is quite a exciting place to be able to future holds. What drives change at The Idol?

Craig Morrison: So that’s a really good question change in our view. What can stimulate change in the first instance, I guess it’s internally or externally driven internally from our staff and we very much empower staff at all levels of the business to come up with change if they think change is needed. Think change is a good idea. You know, we want to understand we want to hear about it. So it’s not something that is traditionally done at the higher level management. We want to see change across the board. We’ve got lots of experience at the business. And as such, we’ve introduced lots of change over the years into annuities into life insurance, into travel insurance, pet insurance, how we transact payments. It’s all introduced change in innovation within the The Idol.

So internally, externally can drive the change that sparked the change. But in terms of what actually drives the changes is people and our people need to be listening to partners, need to be listening to our strategic providers, like yourself, need to be listening to the regulator, need to have an understanding of what’s going on in the market. So listening all the time to understand what change is required, how we are going to be able to address it if indeed we want to address it.

Sally Jones: Yeah, you’re in an industry where you need to be ahead of the curve and comfortable with change because regulations can change and you have to adapt to that. So need to be comfortable with that. And what role do you think AI and machine learning will play in the future?

Craig Morrison: So for us, it’s still early days. We certainly see AI playing a huge role right now at least in code efficiency, testing, efficiency gains. So we’re already using AI to improve some of the quality of cording and improve how we go around testing the quality of the coding and again, for those, you know, partners, staff that listen to this, from a Godel perspective, we attended one of your AI events earlier on this year, when we heard from some of your other business partners that were using AI in methods that we hadn’t necessarily thought about ourselves.

So that was the creation of tickets on Jira, and stories and epics on JIRA that could certainly help support business analysts and product owners in terms of their day jobs. I think AI can use a lot of different varieties. It’s understanding what the business is trying to achieve from it, what the problem is they’re trying to solve. And it’s not replacing people, but it’s trying to make processes more effective and efficient and maybe trying to take some of the mundaneness is said of some of the tasks that people do day in, day out. So that you can then become more effective, efficient and enjoy the job.

Sally Jones: What do you think is in the future for The Idol and Godel?

Craig Morrison: So really interesting for me. I see a generally as BAU, business as usual. We have tripled the number of goodwill resources since we started. So we started with a bare minimum. We didn’t know culturally, how we would fit together. We had a perceived language barrier to overcome and there was a few teething problems way way back. We’ve got a really good understanding of ways of working so you understand how we work with say you work so that when you introduce new Godel colleagues to us, it’s very seamless. It’d be remiss of me not to talk about the cultural workshops, the always good that really well.

And certainly your colleagues have absolutely put Gordon in a fantastic lay in terms of how they deliver those workshops. So for me Bau I think we can continue growing I think, continue looking at different tech stacks, different opportunities, and where appropriate, we expand into those areas. You know, recently we had a meeting with one of your colleagues around AI, something that’s relatively new for us. So understanding from a strategic perspective, what’s working for you? Where our direction of travel is, is there anything we can do jointly or collaboratively to take that forward?

Sally Jones: That’s great. And as you say, I think when we talk about BAU, we really just found that way of working within the partnership where it’s not Godel and The Idol. It’s just the partnerships. I think that’s really nice to hear. So how would you sum up Godel in three words?

Craig Morrison: I’ll look at my notes. So I’ve got my three words. I went to my IT director and asked him what he thought his three words would be just to see if there was any overlap a lot of similarity. So his 3 words were effective, flexible and engaged. My three words were professional, partnership, and integrated. Amazing. So quite similar.

Sally Jones: We’ve got six words.

Craig Morrison: So that’s six words out of three.

Sally Jones: Well, thank you for coming on the podcast. Craig, we really appreciate it and I’m looking forward to continuing to work together in the future.

Craig Morrison: Thanks so much for having me, really appreciate it.