Track record

Wise is a fast-growing fintech. During its growth period the headcount went from 2,000 to 8,000 people. Growth like that does not load an IT function linearly — every new person means an account, a device, access rights, support requests and, eventually, a clean departure, and every new office or country adds its own requirements.

An IT function built for a couple of hundred people does not break all at once; it breaks piece by piece. Manual steps start to run late, exceptions become the norm, and the picture of who has access to what gets blurry. The job is to keep that function working while the load on it multiplies.

Meiko Neuman was Head of IT — responsible for the internal IT function rather than the customer-facing product. That means being accountable for people being able to do their work: devices, accounts, access, support, internal services and the security of all of it.

The role is a management role and a technical one at the same time. On one side you decide what to build and what to buy, in what order to solve problems and how to split work across teams. On the other, you need to understand what is genuinely happening in the systems, because in a fast-growing environment the most expensive mistake is a wrong assumption.

Work in a role like this is fairly predictable and falls into a few large categories. The first is the employee lifecycle: joining, changing role and leaving all have to follow a described process, because once volume grows, manual exceptions are neither traceable nor safe.

The second is identity and access management: who can reach what, on what basis access is granted, who reviews it and how it is removed. The third is the device fleet and endpoint management — issuing machines, configuring them, keeping them updated, and making sure a lost device or a departed colleague's laptop is not left as an open end.

The fourth is the support model. Support that works at two hundred people does not work in the same shape at eight thousand: it needs channels, a priority logic, self-service, and repeat requests removed at their cause. The fifth is vendor and SaaS consolidation — in a growing company, services accumulate faster than anyone reviews them.

The sixth is security and compliance, which has to keep pace with growth rather than catch up after an audit. In fintech that is sharper still.

The IT function carried the whole of that growth: from 2,000 people to 8,000 without everyday work stalling. No other figures for this work are confirmed, so none are claimed here.

Most of our clients will never grow to eight thousand people. But the problems that are obvious in a large organisation are exactly the same in a smaller one, just less visible: the same loose access rights, the same undocumented processes, the same services accumulated by accident.

The practical value is that these patterns have been lived through once already and get recognised before something breaks. It is also why our IT management work always starts with a mapping exercise, and why IAM is so often the first thing worth putting in order.

Inbank is a regulated financial institution. In a regulated environment a technology decision is never only a technical decision: it has a supervisory, legal and auditable side. Every change has to be justified, traceable and, later, explainable to someone who was not in the room when it was made.

In a house like that the pressure runs in two directions at once: the business expects delivery and regulation expects demonstrable correctness. At the same time cost has to stay under control and manual work has to shrink — and that is exactly where both the savings and the risks sit.

Meiko Neuman holds the Head of Tech Platform role at Inbank. It is a leadership role focused on organising technology work: what gets done, in what order, who works on it, and how the outcome is agreed between business and engineering.

Most of the €400,000+ saving described below was delivered through Meixit — as consulting work with Inbank as the client.

In practice the role has produced four concrete workstreams: automating device management, consolidating tooling into the cloud, adopting AI across the organisation, and optimising processes.

The work fell into four workstreams. They depend on each other: you can only automate a process that has been described first, and a cloud-managed environment is the precondition for running devices and access from one place.

Together the four workstreams delivered savings of €400,000+, and most of that saving was delivered through Meixit, as consulting work for Inbank as a client. The saving is not the credit of any single workstream but of their combination — repeated manual work, duplicated tooling and unmonitored spend disappearing one item at a time.

If your company operates somewhere with external requirements — financial services, healthcare, energy or a public-sector context — it helps that the person across the table knows how requirements are translated into everyday work, not only what the document says.

The same applies to cost. Automated device management, tooling consolidation and AI implementation only produce a measurable result when they are part of a wider order — which is the starting point of our IT consulting and IT security approach.

Paxful is a peer-to-peer Bitcoin marketplace founded in 2015 with more than 10 million users. IT tracked the applications in use manually, with spreadsheets and a ticketing system. The team believed there were around 200 applications in use.

Discovery found nearly 500. The gap between those two numbers is the problem in a nutshell: services get bought and adopted faster than anyone adds them to a list. Three things follow at once — licences are paid for but unused, contracts renew unnoticed, and from a compliance point of view nobody knows which services process data.

Meiko Neuman led end user computing at Paxful as Head of EUC (End User Computing) — the function that owns employee devices, workplace applications and SaaS tooling. The SaaS management programme — application discovery, spend and contract control, automated renewal and licence workflows, and compliance documentation — was built and run under that leadership.

The figures below come from Torii's public case study; the work was carried out by Paxful's IT team under his leadership.

The story matters to us because it is exactly the shape of the work we do for clients under SaaS management: application discovery, spend and contract control, and compliance documentation as a standing process rather than a one-off inventory.

Automated shadow IT discovery. In place of a hand-kept spreadsheet there is real-time detection on endpoints and a workflow that alerts IT when a new unsanctioned application appears. The shadow list stops growing quietly in the background.

Automated licence reclamation. Rather than buying new licences, inactive ones are reclaimed automatically and reassigned. Most SaaS overspend does not come from expensive contracts, it comes from people who no longer use the service.

Renewal alerts. Notification arrives 60 days before a contract deadline. That ended surprise renewals and created time for vendor negotiation — the negotiating position is always better before the deadline than after it.

Compliance per application. GDPR and CCPA status is documented for each application, so a compliance audit does not start by hunting the information down again.

Direct access for finance. Contract and spend data was made directly available to the finance team. That closed the gap between IT, which knows what a service is for, and finance, which knows what it costs.

The result within two years was over $715,000 saved on SaaS licences. In a smaller company the figure is different, but the pattern is the same: the number of services in use is larger than assumed, and part of it is paid for without being used.

This is the same work we do for clients under SaaS management, or — when an independent picture of the situation is needed first — as part of IT consulting.