An Embedded Managed Team for Regulated Fintech Integration

Sagicor Bank operates in a market where a national government mandated participation in a country-wide digital wallet program. The program runs on a government-provided digital wallet appliance — every participating bank has to integrate with it, and every participating bank has to do it on the program’s timeline, not their own.

Sagicor’s internal team had the context and the domain knowledge. What they needed was an engineering team that could build the integration APIs at pace, to production quality, alongside the ongoing work the existing team was already carrying. Hiring wasn’t going to solve it on the timeline. Neither was a staff-aug firm dropping in disconnected contractors.

They needed a named, senior-heavy managed team that could embed, ramp fast, and own a workstream.

We stood up a structured managed POD inside Sagicor’s Agile cadence. Named engineers, named roles, fixed weekly capacity — not a revolving door of contractors.

The initial POD composition:

• 2 Senior Software Engineers — 40 hrs/week each, product and integration development.
• 2 Intermediate Software Engineers — 40 hrs/week each, feature build and test.
• 1 DevOps Engineer — 20 hrs/week, pipelines, environments, infra-as-code.
• 1 Project Manager — 20 hrs/week, Scrum events, cross-team coordination, stakeholder reporting.
• 1 Solutions Architect — 10 hrs/week for the first two months, 5 hrs/week thereafter, architecture oversight and reviews.

The engagement ran as time-and-materials on a sprint basis — not fixed-scope. That was the right shape for regulated-fintech work where government-mandate requirements can shift and where the discovery work has to happen inside the sprint cadence, not ahead of it.

The team worked inside Sagicor’s Scrum ceremonies, backlog, and code review process. Weekly checkpoints with Sagicor IT leadership. Daily stand-ups. Sprint demos. The usual things — run in a way that actually worked, not as theater.

The digital wallet API layer. The core of the first phase was the set of APIs that bridge Sagicor’s core banking systems to the government-provided digital wallet appliance. Identity, balance, transfers, transaction reporting, the plumbing that makes the wallet feel like part of the bank for customers — all of it had to be designed against the appliance’s protocols, the bank’s core systems, and the regulatory reporting requirements behind both.

Production-grade engineering, not prototype-grade. Regulated fintech has no tolerance for “we’ll harden it later.” Every endpoint had contract tests, authentication, rate limiting, observability, and audit logging built in from the first release. Security and compliance were first-class requirements in acceptance criteria — not a follow-up ticket.

A tech stack picked for Sagicor’s reality. The POD worked across the stack Sagicor’s environment demanded: TypeScript and Node.js for integration services, React and Angular for front-end surfaces, .NET where the existing ecosystem required it, PostgreSQL and SQL Server for persistence, Postman/Swagger/OpenAPI for API contracts, and a full QA toolkit — Selenium, Puppeteer, Cucumber, JMeter, k6 — so non-functional behavior was tested, not assumed.

Knowledge that stayed with Sagicor. Every delivery cycle produced documentation the Sagicor team could own — API specs, architecture diagrams, runbooks, UAT artifacts, deployment documentation. When the engagement scope shifted, the context didn’t walk out with us.

Government-mandated integration, delivered. Sagicor Bank met the national digital wallet program’s integration requirements on the timeline the mandate required. The APIs we built are live against the government-provided appliance.

A managed team that kept showing up. The initial 2023 POD engagement extended through 2024, then again through 2025. The same named engineers across cycles. Institutional knowledge stayed with the account, not in the rearview mirror of an old SOW.

Expansion into broader modernization. When it came time to scope a Temenos T24 core banking upgrade and AWS migration readiness, Sagicor brought it to the Polymath team already inside the building. That’s the sort of scope growth that only happens when the delivery shape earns it.

The digital wallet integration was the entry point. The current chapter is broader platform modernization — a Temenos T24 core banking assessment, planned upgrade from R14 to R24, and AWS migration readiness for the adjacent infrastructure. Delivered by the same POD that showed up for the first sprint in 2023. That’s our preferred arc: build something the bank relies on, then still be there when the scope grows.