Sector
Financial Services
Banks and fintechs run on platforms where the cost of failure is regulatory action, not a service ticket. We design and operate cloud and data infrastructure for organisations where compliance is the floor, not the ceiling.
Sector context
Financial services platforms in the UK and EU operate inside one of the most demanding regulatory envelopes anywhere: PCI-DSS for payment card data, SOC 2 for service organisations, FCA expectations for operational resilience, and GDPR underneath all of it. Cloud is no longer optional, but cloud done badly creates exactly the kind of audit findings that make boards uncomfortable. Cipherer has spent the last decade delivering inside this envelope: serverless payments platforms, banking data platforms, fintech payments modernisation, and cloud operations programmes at scale.
Track record
- Tesco Bank
Hybrid cloud operations and middleware modernisation, including IBM Sterling Integrator and Connect:Direct estate under PCI and SOX controls. Active Directory enablement, sensitive workload migration, automation pipelines and cost governance across multiple delivery teams.
- Sainsbury's Bank, Mobile Payments Platform
Serverless mobile payments platform on AWS achieving full PCI-DSS compliance. Replaced legacy SFTP with serverless ETL pipelines for improved auditability under stringent legal, financial and regulatory constraints.
- Sainsbury's Bank, Banking Data Platform
Fully serverless banking data platform with integrated ML/AI pipelines for financial modelling, marketing analytics and operational forecasting. Production-grade Data Science programme with governance and automated model deployment.
- Equals Money
Platform engineering for fintech payments infrastructure. Modernised legacy systems into cloud-native environments aligned with regulated-payments compliance standards.
How we approach this sector
Compliance baked in, not bolted on
PCI-DSS, SOC 2 and SOX controls are encoded as policy-as-code, validated continuously in pipelines and enforced at runtime. Audit windows do not require a fire drill.
Operational resilience by design
Multi-region patterns, tested disaster recovery, observability standards and on-call practices that meet FCA expectations on resilience without theatre.
Modernisation that respects the regulator
Legacy retirement (SFTP, on-prem middleware, monolithic data platforms) executed under regulatory continuity. Each step is auditable; each cutover has a rollback.