As a youngster, Simon Goodyear believed there was nothing that couldn’t be solved with technology, and he is now applying this belief to his role at Redwood Bank.
Goodyear, who heads up IT at the business bank, tells Computer Weekly about his plans.
Redwood Bank has lent over £760m since its launch as a cloud-based challenger bank in 2017. The company, which made a profit of £2.7m last year, is based in Letchworth Garden City, and also has a presence in Warrington.
The recently appointed chief information and technology officer (CITO) enjoys solving problems with technology. “I used to joke growing up that there’s nothing a computer can’t solve, and I still believe that, but now I caveat it with time and money as well,” he tells Computer Weekly.
Goodyear has a broad set of experience. Before working in financial services IT in his previous three roles, he held IT roles in the media and military sectors, in software development, and established some independent software companies.
He also has experience working in consultancy, where he strengthened his view that software can solve a huge number of business challenges.
Fintech journey
Redwood is not the first technology-fuelled finance firm at which Goodyear has led the IT function. In 2017, he took up a role at automotive lender Oodle Car Finance, based in Oxford, to lead a team of software developers.
He was involved in the rapid growth of the company, which he describes as having a “super heavy tech focus”. Oodle had about 70 employees, including four software engineers, when he joined, but by the time he left six years later, it had around 700 staff, with 90 engineers.
“I took it through that growth, scaling tech and the business, which was a super interesting challenge,” he says.
I used to joke growing up that there’s nothing a computer can’t solve, and I still believe that, but now I caveat it with time and money as well Simon Goodyear, Redwood Bank
Oodle was “very tech heavy”, says Goodyear, with internal software teams “building pretty much everything, with little bought off the shelf”.
In 2023, he switched to another car lender, JBR Capital. This saw Goodyear go from leading an IT team of 90 people at Oodle to working for a company with just 70 staff in total, only one of whom worked on tech.
After JBR Capital was sold, Goodyear was approached about a role at Redwood Bank, which he says was described to him as a “really interesting challenger bank, profitable and on the precipice of technology being great for them”.
He agreed to an interview, during which he says, “the thing that I noticed most is the bank really wanted to change and drive things forward”.
Established in 2017, Redwood Bank has about 7,000 customers today and has been profitable every year since 2021. It has about 150 employees, nine of whom are technologists.
Tech to-do list
Goodyear recognises that while Redwood launched as a cloud-based bank, a relative tech pioneer in banking terms, that was eight years ago, and what was cutting-edge then is not today.
“We need to think about how we can better use the cloud in some places, and perhaps we’re not as cloud-native as we could be,” he says. “I think there’s room to improve.”
Automation will also feature high on Goodyear’s to-do list. “The organisation talks about being human-led, which I agree with and I’m a big advocate of, but there are places where we’re too human-led and we’re not using technology enough,” he says.
“One of my little mantras is allowing humans to add value. Computers are really good at doing the boring, repetitive stuff, so where can we use more of that, so people can spend more time understanding deals and customers and assets, and writing good business?”
“The organisation talks about being human-led, which I agree with and I’m a big advocate of, but there are places where we’re too human-led and we’re not using technology enough”
Simon Goodyear, Redwood Bank
Cyber security will also receive Goodyear’s attention, and while he says there is nothing wrong with the company’s security posture today, he wants to be certain the company is on top of security for staff and customers, amid the “ever-increasing problem of cyber security”.
Meanwhile, on its tech roadmap, Redwood will work on a mobile app, according to Goodyear.
“That’s a key project for the bank as a whole, and it’s part of the modernisation piece and bringing things up to the standard that I think consumers expect, even in the commercial space,” says Goodyear.
It plans to take a platform off the shelf, with a project to configure it and ensure it is appropriate for its business.
Goodyear also has to get up to speed with Redwood’s core banking platform supplier, Finnova, to “understand its roadmap and how that fits” into everything the bank is doing.
Banks love Excel, ‘but I don’t’
Internally, Goodyear wants the bank to make better use of the large volume of data it holds.
“The other big thing for me internally, which perhaps you don’t see on the outside, is data and making sure that we’re really in control of all of it,” he says. “We’ve got a lot of it, but it’s scattered around the organisation. It’s in various different systems, and while banks love Excel, I don’t, so I want to get rid of that as much as possible.”
On artificial intelligence (AI), Goodyear says its plans are in the very early stages. “From my perspective, the bank as a whole hasn’t really done anything with it, much beyond making sure everybody has Microsoft Copilot,” he says.
“I need to understand the bank a bit more, but from a principal standpoint, I believe in allowing humans to add value. It’s about where we bring AI into the processes we’ve got. We have to make sure those processes are good, because automating bad stuff just makes bad stuff go faster.”
He believes the company’s work with AI will initially be supplier-driven.
“We will look at our own stuff at some point in the future. But if I look at the structure of the team, it doesn’t take a genius to understand that we don’t have those skills at the moment,” he added. “I think we need to eventually [develop in-house], because if we keep using off-the-shelf software, we become the same as everybody else.”
