To move at pace, you need nearshoring support. You’ve done the legwork: vetted CVs, maybe even picked your preferred supplier to plug critical gaps in payments infrastructure or compliance tooling. But bringing in an external tech team comes with a hefty price tag, opens the door to compliance and security risks, and could derail your delivery roadmap if they fail to perform.
That's the weight you're paid to carry. Naturally, you’ll do proper due diligence – identify every gap, inefficiency, and grey area before signing, right? Right?
Combined research across UK and European markets shows up to 50% of firms either lack proper third-party risk frameworks entirely or skip risk assessments altogether when onboarding external providers. Even amongst the savvier half, most ask the wrong questions when evaluating their nearshoring partners.
So what are the right ones? Let’s cut through analysis paralysis and ensure your nearshoring choice delivers lasting impact.
You're evaluating providers and meet an exceptionally polished and knowledgeable pre-sales engineer. Everything clicks – they grasp your technology, speak flawless English, and their communication skills are spot-on. They’ve got the credentials and the presence to match.
The problem starts when their involvement ends there. Once the project kicks off, you’re handed a completely different team. People you've never met, led by someone who might be competent but isn't who you were promised. Sounds familiar? Many nearshoring companies lead with their A-players during the sales process, putting their strongest foot forward. But once they launch, the all-stars disappear, and you’re dealing with a whole different team.
You’ll also be directly involved in selecting your delivery lead and every team member. We’ll share each candidate with you, arrange introductions, and only proceed once you’ve approved the hire. That way, the people you meet at the start are the same people you’ll work with throughout, without any unexpected changes once the project is underway.
As Tom Stewart, our UK account executive lead who’s guided numerous fintech companies through vendor evaluation, puts it:
That way, the people you meet at the start are the same people you’ll work with throughout. Just look at our Funding Circle team – going ten years strong, thanks to experts like Georgi, now a Lead Engineer, who's been managing software delivery for this client since 2018. Their stories in our Day in the Life series show how our seniors stay embedded, growing into senior and lead roles instead of being rotated out for less experienced peers.
👉 Read more stories like Georgi's
In fintech, change isn’t just frequent. It’s relentless and often imposed from outside. Think FCA updates, Cryptoasset and Crypto Promotion Regulations, or the looming rewrite of Consumer Credit Reforms. You don't get to choose whether to adapt; you have to.
When every move faces regulatory scrutiny and compliance failure carries far-reaching ramifications, any abrupt pivot can torpedo a project if teams aren’t agile. That's why you shouldn’t test your nearshoring partner for perfection, but for adaptability.
What happens when the FCA issues new guidance mid-sprint and your compliance requirements shift overnight? Or if Open Banking rules suddenly demand extra API endpoints, will your nearshoring partners scale up resources immediately or leave you scrambling? When regulatory changes scrap your roadmap entirely, what’s their change management framework to recover fast?
These aren't hypotheticals. How quickly your nearshoring partner adapts to scope changes, regulatory pivots, or shifting delivery priorities directly impacts your project success, time-to-market, and ultimately, your bottom line.
Beyond offering fintech-ready talent, our model lets you flex your team size when a compliance deadline moves up or a partner drops a late integration request. As your business needs evolve, you can also downsize your extended teams, with no penalties or prolonged notice periods.
We proved this ability to stop and swerve when developing an AI-powered price prediction engine for one of our fintech clients. The 13-person squad started with thousands of macroeconomic indicators, but their well-trained algorithms kept producing faulty results. Mid-project, our engineers spotted the issue and pivoted to building several machine learning algorithms that cross-check each other's outputs.
Employee turnover: the constant grit in your gears when you're trying to move fast. Research figures vary wildly. Some peg UK turnover at 15%, others sound the alarm at nearly 40% across industries. What everyone agrees on is that tech & IT consistently top the charts, and it's worsening. Within London’s fintech hub, retention challenges are amplified by fierce competition for developers with FCA-regulated product experience and emerging tech skills like blockchain, AI, and open banking APIs.
Nearshoring partners mirror this trend. And whether your specialist quits or gets made redundant due to skills mismatch, the fallout is identical, from derailed timelines to knowledge gaps, and scrambling to backfill while regulatory deadlines loom.
Nobody can guarantee your nearshored expert will stick around forever. But there will be signs. Working with a partner whose retention rate reflects a deliberate, strategic approach, not just luck, helps you set realistic timelines and maintain project stability. Likewise, a vendor struggling to cite multi-year client relationships likely battles retention issues, shallow delivery capability, or buckles under scaling pressure.
It comes down to culture and communication. Our Head of People & Culture, Olena, puts it simply: “One of my main goals is to build a culture of support and continuous feedback… fostering a healthy, supportive environment helps both the business and every individual within it to grow.”
Michał, our Country Manager in Poland, echoes this approach: "I also believe in leading by example and being accessible, which is why I maintain an open-door policy to encourage direct feedback and dialogue."
This translates into real action: regular check-ins with our teams, strategic meetups, and integration events that keep both culture and delivery strong.
As Tom explains:
Some mistakes are unforgivable. Take the 2024 Coinbase incident when their outsourcers illegally accessed sensitive customer data. Or when Russian hackers targeted Capita, the UK-based outsourcing expert, compromising 470,000 users across 90+ client organisations. For fintechs, where a single breach could trigger FCA investigations, customer trust collapse, and massive fines under GDPR, poor partner vetting is simply an existential risk.
But most companies, yours included, will face hundreds of smaller, less dramatic slip-ups. Risk is baked into business, particularly in volatile fintech markets. Every project brings delays, shifting priorities, and unforeseen errors. Which is precisely why your alarm bells should scream when a potential nearshoring partner claims they've never made delivery mistakes.
You want someone who'll own blunders, learn from them, and have processes catching problems early. Frank honesty beats polished promises because the latter sets you up for nasty surprises when things inevitably go sideways.
This gets to the heart of nearshoring team integration. Are they just writing code to spec, or do they internalise the product vision, compliance requirements, and customer outcomes like your in-house team would? The difference matters enormously.
Dig into how they handle code ownership and version control policies. Who owns each product feature? How do they structure communication with your existing teams? Look for concrete practices that foster accountability, such as regular feedback loops, sprint retrospectives, demo days, shared KPIs, and integration touchpoints with your compliance, risk, and security officers.
Motivated teams have clear structures that make each engineer feel their contribution directly impacts the product. Without that sense of ownership, you're paying for expensive contractors rather than genuine team members.
We address this through structured community building: workshops, meet-ups, and conversations beyond sprint planning and bug reports. Our People Partners act as cultural interpreters, bridging authority structures, deadline expectations, and communication styles. Engineers also take part in training on conflict resolution and feedback, ensuring technical skill is paired with cultural fluency.
The outcome is teams that internalise your product vision, compliance frameworks, and customer impact metrics. They take ownership through integrated feedback, retrospectives, and direct collaboration – not because contracts require it, but because they’re genuinely invested in the outcomes you care about.
These cultural integration insights echo challenges discussed in our article on fintech merger challenges.
Indecision kills momentum. These five questions cut through vendor promises and reveal the reality behind the pitch. Ask them early. Demand specifics. Walk away when answers are evasive. Because in fintech, the wrong partner can slow you down, but the right one will accelerate you past the competition.
Tom has guided dozens of fintech leaders through this exact process, answering these questions for Pwrteams and helping them select a vendor with confidence. Ready to put these questions to work?
Book a meeting with Tom or reach out through our contact form — whichever works best for you.