From AI Readiness Assessment to Embedded Engineering Partnership
Client
Hodge Bank is a UK-regulated financial institution with more than 50 years of experience helping customers achieve their financial goals. Trusted by tens of thousands of customers across the UK, it offers specialist savings, commercial lending, mortgages, property finance and retirement solutions.
About
Industry
Financial Services (Banking)
Client Market
Domestic (UK)
Location
United Kingdom
Services Offered
Challenge
Three areas to shape the strategy and turn it into action
Hodge's forward-looking approach to technology and continuous improvement meant it was keen to understand how AI could accelerate its ambitions. It identified three areas where independent expertise could help shape the strategy and turn it into action:
AI readiness and strategic alignment
Hodge's technical leadership wanted an independent, evidence-based assessment of the organisation's readiness for AI adoption. The challenge was to go beyond generic frameworks, grounding recommendations in Hodge's own teams, systems and codebase to create a clear roadmap for AI and wider technology investment.
Modernising QA automation
Hodge saw an opportunity to evolve its established automation framework, adopting more modern tooling and practices while maintaining stability and quality.
Creating a more flexible payments architecture
Hodge wanted to reduce dependency on a single banking partner and create an adaptable integration layer capable of supporting new providers and payment types.
Together, these three priorities called for a single partner able to connect AI and technology strategy with hands-on engineering expertise to deliver lasting, sustainable change.
The Zartis Approach
The engagement has grown across three connected workstreams, combining Hodge’s ambition for AI-enabled transformation with Zartis’ strategic and engineering expertise.
AI readiness and strategic alignment
The assessment’s real value was helping Hodge close the gaps in front of an existing strategy, not build one from scratch. Leadership already had a CTO-level AI strategy underway, including a governance framework, mandatory training and board alignment, but it was invisible to the rest of the organisation.
Goal: Hodge’s technical leadership wanted an independent, evidence-based assessment of the organisation’s readiness for AI adoption.
Solution: Claude Code was a key tool in the delivery for the Zartis team. It synthesised findings directly from fifteen stakeholder interview transcripts across two waves, and separately analysed Hodge's repositories.
- The assessment spanned eight domains, across ten technical roles and eleven SDLC phases
- Synthesised findings directly from fifteen stakeholder interview transcripts across two waves
- Separately analysed Hodge’s GitHub organisation of 406 repositories
- A high-level Target Operating Model and a phased roadmap with dependency mapping
Modernising QA Automation
The legacy framework was already stable, with close to 100% pass rates in steady state, and the new framework matched that reliability. The real value lay elsewhere.
Goal: Hodge saw an opportunity to evolve its established automation framework.
Solution: The team migrated Hodge’s test automation framework to a modern, strongly-typed alternative.
- We embedded two senior QA engineers full-time within Hodge’s development teams
- Close to 100% pass rates in steady state
- Built-in waiting mechanisms removed the need for unreliable sleep-based waits on data loads
- Replaced heavier BDD-style documentation layers with lightweight step annotations
- The new framework is now an industry standard for browser automation
Payments Integration Framework
Supporting Hodge in modernising how it moves money for customers.
Reducing dependency on a single banking partner meant building resilience in from the start: an abstraction layer that keeps Hodge's core systems free of any one partner's technical requirements, now and as partners change.
Goal: Hodge wanted to reduce dependency on a single banking partner.
Solution: An abstraction layer that decouples Hodge’s core systems from any single banking partner’s technical requirements.
- A working proof-of-concept for the full real-time payments flow
- Validated against a mock of the partner interface
- A future-proof architecture that decouples Hodge from any single provider
- A safe, self-contained development environment
- Compliance built in from day one
"This is the second company where I've had the opportunity to work with Zartis, and that speaks to the level of trust I have in their team. I've consistently been impressed by their deep technical expertise, the quality of their strategic guidance, and, most importantly, their ability to turn that expertise into results. Zartis is a partner I trust not only to deliver, but to bring the right thinking and perspective to the table along the way."
Scott Hill
Chief Technology Officer
Business Impact
Evidence-based roadmap for AI adoption
Modernised test automation with zero stability loss
More resilient, provider-agnostic payments architecture
AI-augmented engineering delivering without trading off quality
Results & Highlights
Strategic impact
Each phase building directly on the last
The partnership has grown from a single consulting engagement into a multi-workstream relationship.
A full AI Readiness Assessment
The AI Readiness Assessment contributed to turning Hodge’s AI strategy into an actionable, evidence-backed roadmap.
A test automation framework migration
Held close to 100% pass-rate reliability throughout, proving major technical change didn’t cost Hodge a single point of stability.
A payments integration proof-of-concept
Delivered within weeks of a brand-new workstream, validating the full real-time payment flow end-to-end before any connection to a live banking system.
AI-augmented engineering teams
In-house teams now delivering at pace, without trading off quality.
