Who We Are

We make decisions that are truly in the interest of the customer.

Mina Calvert

The Digizoo founders intentionally created a company and culture that makes decisions that are truly in the interest of the customer.

“The value we drive comes from empathically understanding our customers”
~ Mina Calvert, Digital Banking Lead

A simple example of this is that we may recommend products and services that we may not be able to implement – meaning that we gain no benefit from the engagement.

As another example, we intentionally share our knowledge with your internal teams, so that you can become self-sufficient without us there.

We focus on your business outcomes and the big picture.

We focus on delivery of business outcomes, not just selling products.

“Others sell it to you. We do it with you.”
~ Robert Kassis, CEO

We want to work with you to solve your toughest problems.

“We are not a transactional company; we are a transformational one”
~ Mina Calvert, Digital Banking Lead

And as a result, we are different culturally, and we don’t fit in the traditional paradigm.

We straddle both business and technology.

Digizoo straddles both business and tech. We are technologists who deeply understand the finance industry (banking, insurance, lending) and other regulated sectors. We’re very proud of the unique way our consultants mesh with internal teams, to accelerate product delivery and complement existing skills.

We have unrivalled industry focus and experience.

As a company Digizoo predominantly focuses on banking, financial services, fintechs and other regulated industries.

However, unlike many digital agencies or large global consultancies, almost all of Digizoo’s people have years of accumulated experience within the sector. For instance, our founders each have over 30 years’ experience and all our senior staff have between 25- and 15-years’ experience in banking & finance.

particularly in the digital banking solutions space. This gives us an unrivalled understanding of security and risk & regulatory controls required for Australian banks to comply with their license obligations.

This means that we aren’t just technologists. We are highly knowledgeable about all parts of finance & banking including retail, SME, institutional, lending and so on. We understand banking & financial processes, regulatory compliance, and security obligations. We speak the same language as our customers, which provides great relieve when conversations get into deep into banking jargon.

We bring an artisan mindset and take pride in our work.

Digizoo is made up of strategists, designers, developers, engineers, testers and more – all of whom are creative, passionate, enthusiastic, and engaged. Without fail, they take pride in the quality of their work and are always looking for ways to deliver higher value to customers.

We are multi-faceted problem solvers, who don’t take no for an answer.

Our people are multi-faceted and able to use their broad knowledge to perform multiple roles as the team requires. This approach keeps overhead to a minimum, especially in the early stages.

When delivering projects, we find ways to solve problems that might stop others. To take just one example, we might spin up our own cloud infrastructure for a PoC, because the IT team of the client (a global bank) couldn’t deliver in the timeframe needed by the business.

This approach is how we can deliver an end-to-end solution in weeks, against all odds. It’s how we can deliver our Ark product in just 8 months with only 8 people, who work on it between services engagements.

We seek to grow our individual capabilities.

Digizoo has a real focus on enablement, both inside and out, with a strong culture of supporting each other and sharing knowledge

Team members are continually given opportunities to explore and learn new skills, through side projects, brown-bags and more. They’re encouraged to innovate and show initiative – be it a new atomic design system or a novel approach to team topography.

We are humble and have mutual respect.

Digizoo’s team members treat each other with kindness and humour. They are friends inside the office and out. Go bouldering with them and see for yourself.

“Digizoo has delivered some amazing projects and worked with the biggest names. Yet they rarely talk about their own brilliance, as humility is a cultural trait set by the two founders. As a salesperson, I’ll happily say this on the website, although the CEO might ask me to remove it.”
~ Tym Lawrence, Head of Customer Excellence

Our ways of working are captured as a re-usable ‘products’

As also noted below in the Products areas, we create repeatable ‘product’ that can be packaged up and used again, so we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. This includes frameworks, standards and tools that help define our “ways of working”.

For instance, we’ve built up a repository of experiences and assets cover digital banking, customer origination, loan origination, lending, payments, accounts & transactions.

We are genuinely agile and human-centered.

Digizoo is genuinely agile and human-centered in our approach.

We identify the pains and needs of the users, doing our best to work with you to craft a solution that provides value in addressing those pains and needs.

User experience and accessibility best practice is a standard part of all our engagements.

We use capability squads to deliver consistent good results

Digizoo uses capability squads, where each squad has end-to-end and cross-functional capability to deliver consistent results. The squad is driven and led by our experienced and skilled senior talent.

We have implemented this model with the likes of Greater Bank and since its implementation, there has been an increase of ~62% in efficiency from teams in story delivery and an overall greater level of satisfaction from members involved in this model.

We deliver as one team at the same time as we mentor and enable

We deliver as one team. Digizoo resources work alongside your staff, to scale and grow your capacity. We encourage a truly collaborative way of working, which means that the Digizoo staff will become part of your team for the project duration and beyond, if needed. This means they will be at your office, joining your stand-ups and retrospectives, for as long as is needed.

At the same time, we also uplift and mentor your internal staff. Our capability squads work closely with your internal team to deliver your solution while mentoring them every step of the way. By meshing our team with yours and focussing on knowledge sharing, we enable you to be self-sufficient during and after a successful delivery.

We embrace a product mindset

In recent years, Digizoo has been moving towards a customer-centric product-based mindset. This means we deliver repeatable solutions that can be packaged up and used again, so we don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

We’ve developed a series of pre-built components to accelerate delivery. This could be in the form of code, as seen in our Ark product, or in the new Atlas offering of frameworks, standards and tools that help define our “ways of working”. For instance, we’ve built up a repository of experiences and assets cover digital banking, customer origination, loan origination, lending, payments, accounts & transactions.

We are technology independent and not beholden to any vendor.

When it comes to technology, we are careful to remain an independent ecosystem player. While we may recommend a technology vendor, if we believe they provide the best solution, we will never take money for selling a product from any of our partners.

We choose ‘commoditised’ technologies where-ever possible.

By this we are mean the popular, most recognisable, most common technology, that people want to learn and so are easy to resource. This might be purely open-source technology, or it might be a vendor’s implementation of that technology that comes with additional capabilities and support. It might even be a proprietary technology delivered by just one vendor.

We automate everything, as much as possible

We don’t believe in having to do things more than once, and seek to avoid inefficiencies, so when we deliver solutions, we leverage modern DevSecOps processes and tools to automate everything, as much as possible.

Infrastructure as code. Automated testing. Automated build and deployment. These are the things we bring to every project.