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Forbes
03-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Proven Ways To Foster Project Ownership Among Dev Teams
When developers take ownership of their work, they tend to be more productive, engaged and invested in a project's success. But fostering that sense of responsibility doesn't happen by accident—it takes intentional leadership and a culture that supports autonomy and accountability. Below, members of Forbes Technology Council share strategies they've used to successfully cultivate project ownership within their teams. Read on to learn how the right mix of clarity, autonomy and recognition can transform task-focused developers into truly empowered collaborators. 1. Give The Team Meaningful Autonomy The most effective way to nurture genuine project ownership in developers is by giving them meaningful autonomy right from the project's outset. Allowing team members to define and shape the solutions encourages accountability and inspires deeper personal investment. This approach leverages developers' intrinsic motivation, significantly improving project outcomes. - Serge Beck, Omniwire 2. Pair Engineers Up With Sales Or Customer Success Leads I've found that pairing engineers directly with sales or customer success leads on key features creates a strong sense of project ownership. At Ratio, this simple act turns a developer into a stakeholder. When they see how their work shapes the customer's experience or drives revenue, they start to think beyond code. It shifts the mindset from task execution to product impact. - Ashish Srimal, Ratio Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify? 3. Hire Team Members Who Can Anticipate Issues Hiring a high-level talent who is a proactive thinker, not just a task executor, instills a project ownership mindset. Beyond delegation, growth comes from team members who anticipate issues and take the initiative to solve them and seize opportunities. Autonomy accompanied by strategic communication fosters trust and accountability, essential for scaling quickly and efficiently. - Benjamin Claeys, QR TIGER 4. Share The 'Why' Developers feel ownership when product owners share the 'why.' Technical architects involve them early in tech decisions and actively invite their ideas. Engaging devs in frequent feedback boosts pride, trust and responsibility, transforming coders into empowered project stakeholders. - Matthew Cloutier, Sticky Strategy 5. Let Team Members Know You Have Their Backs In my experience, the idea of someone having my back no matter what has helped me build that mindset of ownership in a given situation. The same concept can be applied to dev team members. Everyone is working toward a collective goal with a shared responsibility to make any project a success. - Leena Waghmare, Gilead Sciences, Inc. 6. Allow Developers To Focus On Quality Through Deployment Using Agile development, test-driven development (TDD) and shift-left practices empowers developers to own features, test early and focus on quality through deployment. This builds pride in seeing their work live and sharpens accountability—if it breaks, they're on call. The result: better quality, stronger ownership and energized teams. - Sal Visca, Vertex Inc. 7. Encourage Team Members To Complete Project Management Professional Training Encourage all team members to complete foundational PMP training so they understand the full project lifecycle, key dependencies and stakeholder expectations. The education creates alignment across roles and fosters ownership by showing how their contributions impact delivery, risk and client outcomes. - Mike Hyzy, CGI 8. Align The Team With Business Outcomes One effective strategy is to align developers with business outcomes, not just tasks, and give them end-to-end responsibility for features, including user impact and metrics. This fosters accountability, deeper engagement and innovation, as team members see the real-world value of their work beyond code commits. - Hrushikesh Deshmukh, Fannie Mae 9. Allow Them To Make Key Technical Decisions Grant team members autonomy within clear, well-communicated constraints. When empowered to make key technical decisions, employees will often shift from task execution to outcome ownership. This builds intrinsic accountability, strengthens problem-solving and fosters pride in results—which can help drive sustained engagement, better collaboration and higher-quality deliverables. - Oka Kiyoshi 10. Let Them Weigh In On 'How,' Not Just 'What' We should empower our dev team members with significant autonomy and decision-making authority over 'how' a project should be built—not just 'what' needs to be built. This strategy is effective because it increases engagement, fosters accountability and leverages expertise. - Ambika Saklani Bhardwaj, Walmart Inc. 11. Pay A Small Bonus For Every Uncovered Bug Pay devs a small bonus for every bug they uncover in peer reviews. Fault-finding becomes a team sport, boosting code quality, pride and shared ownership. Further, it catches flaws early, saving sprint time and proving that quality is everyone's job. - Erick Grau, Chibitek 12. Assign Temporary Ownership Of Components Or Feature Areas One effective strategy is rotating tech stewardship by assigning each dev temporary ownership of a component or feature area. It empowers autonomy, encourages long-term thinking and builds cross-functional empathy. This works well because it balances accountability with trust, reinforcing that ownership isn't about titles, but about stewardship and care for outcomes. - Raghu Para, Ford Motor Company 13. Embed Developers In The Discovery Phase Embedding developers early in the product discovery phase while involving them in user research, design conversations and outcome mapping fosters a stronger sense of ownership. This strategy is particularly effective because it ties technical contributions to real-world impact, increasing engagement, accountability and intrinsic motivation to drive both product quality and business success. - Nicola Sfondrini, PWC 14. Let Developers Give Their Services Fun Names Let developers name their services with terrible puns. Nobody abandons a microservice called 'DataBased' or 'Cache Me Outside.' Pride in bad wordplay creates stronger ownership than any RACI matrix. The engineer who named it will defend it like their first pet. - Ishaan Agarwal, Square 15. Foster A Deeper Understanding Of Dependencies Giving developers knowledge-graph-driven visibility into system identities, access pathways and governance fosters a deeper understanding of dependencies. When developers see how their work affects security and operations, it drives accountability and ownership. This transparency also empowers better decision-making around secure design and risk mitigation. - Craig Davies, Gathid 16. Let Them Work Directly With Customers Involve devs directly in customer interactions—from discovery to proof of concept to demo. When engineers hear real needs, questions and feedback firsthand, they're more invested in outcomes, not just outputs. It builds accountability, empathy and a deeper sense of ownership across the build lifecycle. - Karen Kim, Human Managed 17. Give End-To-End Responsibility One highly effective strategy to instill a project ownership mindset among developers is to give engineers end-to-end responsibility, from design to deployment to post-launch monitoring. This strategy works particularly well because it aligns technical contributions with business outcomes. Developers begin to see how their work impacts users and performance metrics. - Pratik Badri, JPMorgan Chase & Co. 18. Shift The Focus From Outputs To Outcomes Shift the team's focus from measuring outputs (lines of code, for example) to measuring outcomes (business impact). This encourages developers to think like the end user by connecting their technical work directly to real-world results and user value. This strategy naturally fosters a sense of ownership and accountability for the project's overall success. - Kevin Cushnie, MC Systems 19. Build Ownership And Active Communication Into Your Culture There are two parts to this. Culture is one. Ownership needs to be built in as a standard in any organization. If you can't own a project, you don't belong. Second, there needs to be a lot of active communication. Make sure devs know they are heard and that their ideas and recommendations come before profits and deadlines. - Sabrin Freedman-Alexander, Cloudvoid 20. Rotate The Scrum Master Role I empower developers by rotating the Scrum Master role each sprint. They get to lead, present to stakeholders, make key decisions and own the outcomes. This fosters true accountability and leadership. It's remarkable when they feel that personal stake in the results—beyond just code, their work and dedication truly flourish. - Uttam Kumar, American Eagle Outfitters
Forbes
10-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
The Next Fintech Unicorns Will Be Built On Invisible Infrastructure
Serge Beck, the founder and CEO of Omniwire, is driven by his belief that people deserve robust and secure financial services. For the past decade, most fintech success stories have appeared similar from the outside: intuitive mobile apps, sleek interfaces and rapidly growing user bases. However, something has changed. Today's important innovations in fintech are no longer visible to the end user. They are happening in the infrastructure layer that makes modern financial services possible. Quietly, these systems are becoming the foundation for the next generation of fintech unicorns. Founders are no longer trying to compete solely on the interface. Investors are no longer rewarding shallow growth. Users are no longer impressed by a clean dashboard if the service behind it is slow, limited or unreliable. According to CB Insights, the Fintech 100 cohort has raised nearly $22 billion in equity funding across 381 deals since 2019. Among the winners in 2023 were core banking and infrastructure platforms. Invisible infrastructure refers to the core technologies that support financial products behind the scenes without being seen by the end user. From payments and identity verification to compliance and core banking, this infrastructure forms the backbone of every fintech offering. Key infrastructure categories include: Banking-As-A-Service (BaaS): Enables nonbanks to offer regulated financial services such as accounts, payments and lending under their brand. Payment Processing Systems: Facilitate fast, secure payment initiation, routing and settlement. The global digital payments market is projected to reach $19.89 trillion by 2026. Card Issuing Technology: Powers creating and managing physical and virtual payment cards at scale. Compliance And Risk Engines: Automate critical functions like anti-money laundering checks, transaction monitoring and identity verification. In practice, here's how it looks: When a fintech app lets a user open an account, send a payment or issue a debit card, that front-end interaction is powered by an invisible stack of infrastructure services. Several companies have emerged to lead this shift: • Unit offers embedded banking platforms that allow startups to offer accounts, cards and payments by integrating directly with banking rails. • Alloy helps fintech automate identity verification and risk decisions, enabling faster onboarding while staying compliant with global regulations. These infrastructure players do not market to consumers or need brand recognition among end users. Instead, they focus on delivering reliability, scalability and compliance to the companies building consumer-facing products. According to Boston Consulting Group, the global fintech market is expected to reach $1.5 trillion annually by 2030. Much of that growth will be driven not by flashy apps but by the infrastructure quietly powering them. Here are the key reasons driving this trend: Launching a financial product used to take months of engineering work. Infrastructure providers now allow companies to go live in weeks. APIs replace the need to build core systems from scratch, which means startups can focus on customer experience rather than back-end development. Infrastructure platforms handle payments, KYC, fraud detection and ledger management so companies do not have to. That means fewer internal resources are needed to build and maintain core functions. Regulations in fintech change often and vary by region. Infrastructure providers are designed to keep up with these shifts. They build compliance into their systems, reducing the chance of mistakes and delays. While invisible infrastructure has become a foundational part of how fintech is built today, it is not without its challenges. One of the first challenges is platform dependency. When a company integrates deeply with an infrastructure provider, switching costs rise quickly and migrating away is rarely simple. Regulatory responsibility is another key consideration. While many infrastructure providers offer built-in compliance features, the ultimate responsibility for compliance often still rests with the company offering the financial product. Security and data handling can also become more complex. Even when providers are compliant, any breach or downtime from the third-party infrastructure affects not just one company, but potentially dozens of customers relying on the same infrastructure. Lastly, the long-term economics of building on infrastructure should be carefully evaluated. While upfront costs are lower, and speed to market is faster, the cumulative fees from usage-based pricing can grow significantly at scale. What looks like operational efficiency in the early stages can turn into a margin challenge as the business matures. This doesn't mean the model is flawed. However, it does require careful forecasting to keep unit economics healthy over time. As this infrastructure becomes the default way to build in fintech, what success looks like for operators and those backing them is changing. Startups succeed by moving fast and focusing on their edge. For fintech founders, that edge is rarely in building internal compliance systems, managing bank integrations or handling payments infrastructure from the ground up. Instead, founders should direct their energy toward what sets their product apart. Everything else, like payments, identity verification, card issuance and account creation, can and should be handed off to trusted infrastructure providers. For investors, this shift changes how they should evaluate early-stage fintech opportunities. Consumer-facing products will always have appeal, but the more durable value often sits in the companies that enable those products. Infrastructure companies benefit from: High retention, because once integrated, they are hard to replace. Recurring revenue is important since they typically charge per user, per transaction or via platform fees. Scale without exposure because they support many customers without taking on direct regulatory or reputational risk from end users. These traits make infrastructure businesses highly attractive, especially in uncertain or highly competitive markets. They also grow and benefit from the ecosystem's success rather than just their own. For investors, the takeaway is clear: Backing the right infrastructure company means betting not just on one business model but an entire generation of fintech builders who depend on it. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
Business Wire
22-04-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
Omniwire and NowutalkAI Partner to Launch the First AI Voice Personal Banker for Banks, Fintechs, and Credit Unions
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Omniwire, Inc., a next-generation Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) cloud-based platform, today announced a landmark partnership with NowutalkAI, Inc., licensing its patent-pending 'Voice to Action' technology to deliver the industry's first AI Voice Personal Banker —a multilingual, conversational banking assistant available as a white-label solution for banks, fintechs, and credit unions. This strategic collaboration will position Omniwire at the forefront of AI innovation within the fintech and banking industries, providing a secure, scalable platform that makes conversational, voice-first banking a reality for institutions of all sizes. Redefining Digital Banking Through AI Voice Omniwire's Banking-as-a-Service platform allows businesses to launch and scale financial services with unmatched speed and security. Now, with the integration of NowutalkAI's conversational voice engine, clients can offer their end users a smart, natural-language AI voice personal banker capable of managing finances through simple voice commands—in 80+ languages. 'This partnership marks a shift from transactional banking to truly conversational banking,' said Serge Beck, CEO of Omniwire. 'We're not just embedding AI voice personal banker—we're building a secure, voice-first future where banks and fintechs can deliver personal, intelligent service at scale.' Key Capabilities & Benefits White-Label AI Voice Personal Banker A secure, multilingual, voice-powered assistant designed to enhance digital banking experiences by enabling users to navigate their accounts, access information, and get answers to common questions—simply by speaking naturally. Voice recognition technology adds an extra layer of security, ensuring that only authorized users can access sensitive financial information. 80+ Languages Supported Built for global financial institutions and diverse user populations, the assistant adapts to regional language and user behavior instantly. Modular BaaS Infrastructure Launch full-stack neobanks or embed financial services via APIs—including core banking, card issuance, processing, and compliance. Enterprise-Grade Security & Compliance Omniwire's infrastructure is PCI-DSS, SOC 2, ensuring robust protection for data, transactions, and customer trust. Rapid Go-to-Market Launch fully operational, AI-powered financial products in 12 weeks or less with no internal dev team required. All-in-One Support & Management Omniwire delivers and maintains the full tech stack, including regulatory compliance, customer support, and real-time infrastructure monitoring. Designed for the Future of Financial Services Whether you're a fintech startup, a regional bank, or a credit union seeking to modernize your customer experience, Omniwire's platform now enables a secure, AI-powered voice interface that enhances engagement, reduces friction, and empowers users to bank on their own terms—anytime, anywhere, in their own language. About Omniwire, Inc. Omniwire, Inc. is a modular, Cloud based, Banking-as-a-Service platform built for the future of financial services. With native support for AI, embedded finance, and voice-first technology, Omniwire empowers brands, fintechs, and institutions to launch digital banking experiences quickly and securely. The platform is fully PCI-DSS, SOC 2 certified. Visit About NowutalkAI, Inc. NowutalkAI is pioneering the next generation of human-computer interaction with its AI-powered 'Voice to Action' platform, which transforms complex digital experiences into natural, intuitive voice conversations. Supporting over 80 languages, NowutalkAI makes apps, websites, and services more human, accessible, and intelligent. Visit Omniwire: Where Compliance Meets Conversational Banking—Powered by AI. For a branded PDF or to be added to a media kit, contact Claudia Calvo.
Associated Press
14-03-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
Nowutalk AI Launches Voice-First Sales Agent for Shopify Stores, Empowering E-Commerce Owners with Real-Time Insights
Holmdel, NJ March 13, 2025 --( The AI-powered sales agent not only sells for you but also helps merchants make smarter decisions—Nowutalk AI is live. Nowutalk AI is transforming online shopping with the first voice-driven sales agent for Shopify stores, bringing the ease of in-store conversation to digital shopping. Unlike chatbots, Nowutalk AI doesn't just answer questions—it sells. With a simple voice command, customers can browse products, get instant recommendations, and complete purchases hands-free. But it's not just about voice—behind every interaction, Nowutalk AI gathers real-time intelligence to help merchants make data-backed business decisions. 'E-commerce owners struggle with data overload. We don't just automate sales—we help them understand their customers better, in real-time,' said Serge Beck, CEO of Nowutalk AI. 'We built a voice agent that does more than just talk—it learns, adapts, and helps businesses grow.' Live on Shopify & Protected by a Patent Merchants can install it on Shopify and start converting voice interactions into sales today. The technology is also patented, making it a first-mover in voice-driven e-commerce intelligence. Real Traction & Influencer Backing ● Beta testers include a top influencer with 3.5M followers, testing Nowutalk AI in his store. ● Strategic partnerships are rolling out to integrate Nowutalk AI into more high-traffic e-commerce platforms. ● 60% of the team are engineers, ensuring a product built for scale. Why This Matters for E-commerce Owners ● Increase Conversions: Customers shop faster with conversational commerce. ● Data-Driven Sales: Merchants receive intelligence reports to optimize inventory & marketing. ● Seamless Integration: Works instantly with Shopify—no complex setup. Get Involved ● Merchants: Install Nowutalk AI on Shopify App Store ● Investors: Join their Wefunder campaign ● Media/Press: Contact them at [email protected] ● For more information, visit About Nowutalk AI Nowutalk AI is transforming digital interactions with next-generation AI-powered voice sales agents. The company delivers human-like conversations that convert browsers into buyers by integrating core Intelligence, natural language processing, and adaptive learning. As a leader in voice-first AI technology, Nowutalk AI is setting a new standard for customer engagement and sales automation in e-commerce. Testing the waters legal disclosure. We are 'testing the waters' to gauge investor interest in an offering under Regulation Crowdfunding. No money or other consideration is being solicited. If sent, it will not be accepted. No offer to buy securities will be accepted. No part of the purchase price will be received until a Form C is filed and only through Wefunder's platform. Any indication of interest involves no obligation or commitment of any kind. Nowutalkai, Inc. Claudia Calvo
