Platform as a Product in a 300-Year-Old Bank

Naming a team "Platform as a Product" is one thing, getting results is a socio-technical journey. This talk will look at how the PaaP team at NatWest Bank built technology, and trust, that reduced the time-to-market for Kubernetes applications by over 97%. This talk will bring the industry leading CNCF white papers on platform engineering to life by looking at how a 50 year old bank applied that theory into practice.

Transcript

1. NATWEST × SYNTASSO Applying Platform as a Product in a 300-year-old bank How one of the UK's largest banks applied industry leading ideas to turn undifferentiated heavy lifting into a self-service platform THE INDUSTRY VIEW Abby Bangser Syntasso Founding Engineer KubeCon Co-Chair and CNCF Ambassador THE CASE STUDY Joel King NatWest Group Principal Engineer
2. THE TRENDS THE INDUSTRY CHALLENGE Most engineering effort is non-differentiating 80% Generic tooling CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes, monitoring stacks… Duplicated heavy lifting The same plumbing repeated across every team Tech debt & maintenance Keeping the lights on crowds out innovation NATWEST × SYNTASSO 02 / 25
3. THE INDUSTRY IMPACT Business outcomes are suffering Speed Safety Efficiency ▼ ▼ Shift-left shifted cognitive load, not outcomes 68% blocked meeting customer needs by existing tech 76% expect to grow tech headcount for agentic AI. 28% of IT spend reaches application development NATWEST × SYNTASSO 03 / 25 THE TRENDS
4. THE INDUSTRY IMPACT And no, AI isn't improving this. AI is compounding it. THE TRENDS
5. MEET NATWEST NatWest is a 300-year-old, 20-million-customer bank A UK-focused bank serving over 20 million customers — at a scale that makes every platform decision compound. 20M+ customers served #1 lender for UK infrastructure ~59k staff worldwide 11.4M mobile app users 1M new customers added in 2025 700k+ new credit-card customers in 2025 81.8% of retail banking customers bank entirely digitally NATWEST × SYNTASSO 05 / 25 THE CASE STUDY
6. Every story needs the forest view and a tree example ABBY · THE FOREST The big picture Tracking industry wide socio-technical patterns. Codifying trends and supporting measured improvements. JOEL · THE TREE A real example How a single 300-year-old bank actually built it. The problem, the architecture, and next step scale. NATWEST × SYNTASSO 06 / 25 WELCOME
7. Where we're going today The Shift NATWEST × SYNTASSO 07 / 25 OUR ROADMAP Building Why platforms, why now From theory to outcomes Supporting future vision Scaling
8. NATWEST · THE CHALLENGE At NatWest, scale and complexity collide COMPLEXITY 135+ patterns in production — with unsustainable growth , ever-increasing complexity, and delivery that has slowed to a crawl. SCALE 10s departments 100s teams 1000s staff All moving to containerisation at once — every team solving the same infrastructure problems in parallel. NATWEST × SYNTASSO 08 / 25 THE CASE STUDY
9. NATWEST · THE CONSEQUENCES The cost: cognitive load, drift, and slow change 01 High cognitive load on development teams 02 Duplication of effort across application teams and services 03 Inconsistent environments and configuration drift 04 Slow, manual, and error-prone change processes 05 Limited visibility and control across multi-cluster fleets NATWEST × SYNTASSO 09 / 25 THE CASE STUDY
10. HOW WE GOT HERE The pendulum is swinging toward platform engineering Centralised Ops Safety through tickets ◀ SAFETY SPEED ▶ Gartner expects 80% of enterprises to establish platform engineering teams NATWEST × SYNTASSO 10 / 25 THE TRENDS Decentralised DevOps Speed through freedom. Balanced Platform Engineering Self-service with guardrails.
11. PRE-2022 The hype-cycle needed grounding A fragmented landscape: everyone agreed platforms mattered but not on what they were SCEPTICISM Dismissed as "new hype" or "rebranded ops". TERMINOLOGY CHAOS No industry-wide agreement on what this is. UNCERTAINTY Big projects with poor ROI. TOOL-CENTRIC Repurposing tools over business outcomes. NATWEST × SYNTASSO 11 / 25 THE TRENDS
12. A SHARED LANGUAGE EMERGES CNCF is documenting a proven path WHAT Platforms White Paper Building a common language and defining platforms as outcomes over outputs. HOW Maturity Model Growth framework of practices and processes delivering white paper outcomes. NATWEST × SYNTASSO 12 / 25 THE TRENDS
13. THE WHITE PAPER First application of the three-tier architecture NATWEST × SYNTASSO 13 / 25 THE TRENDS At their most basic, internal platforms provide consistent experiences for acquiring and using individual services…As they mature internal platforms also offer compositions of such services. Presentation Application Data
14. THE MATURITY MODEL Five dimensions codify organisational trade-offs Built through end-user, consultant, and vendor collaboration bringing diverse perspectives, real use cases. Investment How are staff and funds allocated to platform capabilities? Adoption Why and how do users discover and use internal platforms? Interfaces How do users interact with and consume platform capabilities? Operations How are platforms planned, prioritised, developed, and maintained? Measurement How is feedback gathered, incorporated, and learned from? NATWEST × SYNTASSO 14 / 25 THE TRENDS
15. FROM THEORY TO A STACK Platform as a Product, end to end NATWEST × SYNTASSO 15 / 25 THE CASE STUDY Engineering Toolchain Developer Portal Service Resiliency & Security Control Automation Engineering Products & Services Infra Products & Services Data Products & Services Opinions Network Automation Process Automation App Code Repos Eng Code Repos Infra Code Repos Data Code Repos Code Repos Standards & Template Frameworks Developer/ Engineer Patterns/Products Tooling Integration Self-Service UI Service Catalogue Tech Doc (Auto) Developer Portal Standards & Template Frameworks
16. NATWEST · THE APPROACH Kubernetes and GitOps put the platform on rails 01 · SOURCE OF TRUTH All platform and infra definitions version-controlled in Git, reducing cognitive load. 02 · GOLDEN PATHS Reusable, declarative templates eliminate duplication and drive consistency. 03 · RECONCILIATION Flux keeps clusters aligned with desired state — no configuration drift. 04 · FLEET CONTROL Multi-cluster GitOps enables scalable, consistent rollout of capabilities. 05 · SAFE CHANGES Every change is reviewed, approved, and traceable through Git. 06 · DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE Developers consume capabilities as curated products — not bespoke setups. NATWEST × SYNTASSO 16 / 25 THE CASE STUDY
17. NATWEST · NatWest PaaP Architecture — Request Flow NATWEST × SYNTASSO THE CASE STUDY Self-Service Request (Developer Portal/GitOps/API) Control Plane - Kratix and Supporting Operators Kratix (Promise CRD + Pipeline) Resource Configure Pipeline (workflows) ECR/Other Registry (Container Images and OCI Artifacts) GitLab (Desired State) GitOps/Flux CD (Reconciliation Loop) Downstream Tooling Terraform Enterprise (HCP Terraform) ACK Controllers (K8s-native AWS) Other Integrations (OnPrem IaaS, ServiceNow etc.) AWS Accounts (EKS, S3, IAM, RDS, VPC) Fleet Management & Multi-Cluster Deployment Customer Cluster 1 GitOps → Reconcile Workloads + Config Customer Cluster 2 GitOps→ Reconcile Workloads + Config Customer Cluster 3 GitOps → Reconcile Workloads + Config ... Cluster N GitOps → Reconcile Workloads + Config
18. WHERE THE LEADERS ARE GOING Innovators are building composable marketplace platforms "A platform should be composable — enabling product teams to provide and manage their own capabilities." "Platform teams are most responsible for the interfaces and user experiences." "Platform capabilities are transparently integrated into the tools and processes that teams already use." "Capability providers take on the brunt of responsibility for maintenance." NATWEST × SYNTASSO 18 / 25 THE TRENDS EXPERIENCES CAPABILITIES
19. MARKETPLACE · THE MODEL Defining the multi-player friendly interface PROVIDERS Security Data Vendor Finance Independent, managed, composable, and testable. → PROVIDER INTERFACE Design for coherency over blind compliance. → CONSUMERS INTERFACE Anyone can consume any capability through prefered tools via consistent user APIs. NATWEST × SYNTASSO 19 / 25 THE TRENDS API Support Tools Standards
20. Platform wide principles: • Extensible • Composable • Declarative • Governable • Observable • Evolvable MARKETPLACE · THE MODEL In other words, you need to build a ever flexible puzzle THE TRENDS Always with an eye on delivering the ability to adapt quickly, build confidently, and operate sustainably Component specific principles: • Product Scoped • Self-Serve • Operationally Owned NATWEST × SYNTASSO 20 / 25
21. THE METHODOLOGY Initial 8 factors that support an effective interface 1 Produced by API 2 Consumed by API 3 Self-managed value stream 4 Reconciled state 5 Implementation agnostic 6 Fleet-managed instances 7 Operational clarity 8 Continuous governance NATWEST × SYNTASSO 21 / 25 THE TRENDS
22. NATWEST · NatWest PaaP Architecture — Producer Flow NATWEST × SYNTASSO THE CASE STUDY
23. NATWEST · Outcomes Outcomes of applying Platform as a Product 01 Faster time to value 02 Higher Autonomy 03 Improved Security and Compliance 04 Standardisation at scale 05 Clear ownership boundaries NATWEST × SYNTASSO 23 / 25 THE CASE STUDY
24. Where we've been today The Shift THE RECAP Initial Build Extended Innovation It happened, what does it mean Product over project approach Sustainability breeds growth • Platforms fill the gap of what is unique to your business but common to your teams • It is worth building once, but accept not everyone will fit • Success socio-technical both in investment and outcomes • Early customers and contributors validate the path • The only guarantee is change, reducing bottlenecks is key • Clear ownership boundaries and outcomes drives engagement NATWEST × SYNTASSO 24 / 25
25. THE TAKEAWAY Outcomes over outputs demands flexibility The industry is moving toward composable, self-service platforms. NatWest shows it's buildable today with golden paths, reconciled state, and capabilities consumed as products. THE FOREST Abby THE TREE Joel THANK YOU AND QUESTIONS? NatWest × Syntasso