UK firm seeks SA developers to expand its tech stack

A team of GPP’s Cape Town-based software developers.

UK-based fintech firm Global Prime Partners (GPP) is expanding its technology team.

The financial services provider says it is exclusively targeting Cape Town’s high-calibre senior software developers.

Founded in 2008, GPP is a multi-platform company that provides financial services, such as clearing and custody solutions, to over 200 institutional clients, consisting mainly of fund managers that require an integrated set of services for customers.

GPP says it transacts around $5 billion daily through its client trades.

While it does not provide services to the South African market, it has an office in Cape Town, where its team of 24 software developers work on its portfolio of tech solutions, which include its proprietary financial platform, Global Back Office (GBO).

During an interview with ITWeb, Trevor Sumner, head of engineering, said GPP is expanding its technology stack after it was acquired by UK-based wealth and asset management firm Titan Wealth in 2021.

The acquisition, he added, is part of Titan’s strategy to bring a new proposition to the wealth and asset management sector in the UK, and offer independent services to investment managers and independent financial advisers.

“GPP’s acquisition by Titan offers attractive opportunities for South African-based senior developers. We are preparing to modernise our systems and this is an extremely exciting opportunity for us.

“Our GBO fintech platform is able to integrate into third-parties and is central to taking the company in different directions in order to provide an end-to-end solution to Titan clients. The product is currently being transformed to add more value to clients through further expansion, modernisation and integration.

“We have partnered with Microsoft, and as part of this new development, we are expanding our software developer team and have exclusively selected the development team in SA to prepare us to scale for growth,’ noted Sumner.

“As we bring top South African talent to the team, we are also upskilling our current team to enable them to provide services to the entire Titan group.”

While Sumner was not able to disclose the number of new developers to be added to the team, he said the company started advertising for candidates in December and the recruitment process has already begun.

According to Sumner, GBO was last year responsible for processing £2.6 trillion worth of transactions – a significantly higher number than before the acquisition and a reflection of the extent of scaling required in order to cater for customers that will require additional services.

Despite SA’s IT skills dearth, GPP believes the country is blessed with highly-qualified developers who are of international standard.

According to OfferZen’s 2022 State of the Developer Nation report, SA is pitted against multinational corporations, as the growing digital skills dearth leads to a fierce fight for highly-skilled local software developers.

Sumner points out that as a top priority, GPP’s Cape Town-based developer team will start working on data analytics services, to enable the company to securely extract and use data to help the business optimise its performance.

“While we do not target South African clients, from a technical perspective, our developer team is entirely locally-based. This speaks to the talent we have in SA, and how much we are valued.

“Our developer team is to the brim with absolutely talented individuals who have great minds and who are able to deliver first world financial solutions, and operate at an international level. At the same time, we are bringing international education of financial instruments to local developers.

“From a business perspective, this also makes a lot of sense, because it’s a minor cost-saving effort, of not hiring UK-based employees, where the cost of living is much higher,” he added.

Looking ahead, GPP will introduce a transformation strategy, which will pave a way for the recruitment of more local, female developers.

“We would like to create capacity to on-board young South African female developers, and give them the opportunity to form part of our development team. We have amazing female engineers in the various teams and we are looking to create an avenue of tech skills within the younger generation,” concluded Sumner.