One of our fintech clients had a backlog of hundreds of internal tool requests. Leave forms, reconciliation helpers, little dashboards. Nothing glamorous, all of it painful. Many systems still ran on spreadsheets and email chains.

Staff had started building solutions with chatbots, but they were insecure and only worked on their individual devices.

So we built them a factory instead of building them apps.

How it works

  1. Prompt the idea. Someone writes a one-line prompt, then fleshes out the idea with the agent until it works completely.
  2. Build. Coding agents build it from approved templates in React and FastAPI. Company design system, sign-in and logging come for free.
  3. Check. Every build gets tested, scanned for secrets and checked for POPIA data handling.
  4. Ship. It deploys as its own service on the company’s cloud machines, behind VPN and sign-in, with full auditing and logging. The dev team gets alerts every time an app is updated or shipped, and anything touching production data needs a human yes.
< 20 minIdea to deployed app
34Internal apps shipped
≈ 0Backlog, down from near infinite

Marketing, the data team and portfolio managers now build their own tools. The backlog went from near infinite to near zero in a few weeks.

The bit people miss

Speed wasn’t the win. Control was. The safe route is now the fastest route, and everyone in the company is empowered to build apps and solutions for everyone else to use.

Make the safe way the easy way and people pick it on their own.