Why Tech Leaders in FinTech and PropTech Are Choosing Delivery Squads Over Traditional Agencies

Traditional agencies were built for campaigns. Delivery squads were built for scale. That difference is why FinTech leaders chasing growth and PropTech innovators chasing efficiency are making the switch.

Traditional agency models, with slow onboarding and rigid processes, struggle to keep pace with industries where weeks of delay can mean lost deals or missed investment rounds. 

Nearly half of organisations report that more than 30% of their technology development projects experience delays or exceed budget. (source: BCG, 2024)

Delivery squads dramatically reduce those risks by integrating teams in workflows with shared goals.

In the next few minutes, you’ll discover:

• The real difference between delivery squads vs agencies
• How squads help FinTechs scale faster with less risk
• Why PropTech firms gain efficiency and focus with embedded teams

You’ll fully understand why delivery squads, not agencies, are powering the next wave of FinTech and PropTech innovation.

What Are Delivery Squads and How Do They Differ From Agencies?

Delivery squads are cross-functional teams built to deliver end-to-end outcomes. Instead of splitting work between separate agency departments, a squad combines developers, DevOps engineers, QA specialists, and product leads into a single pod that operates within your workflow. This means fewer hand-offs, faster delivery, and more ownership over results.

Agencies, by contrast, usually follow a project-based model. Work moves between account managers, design teams, and external contractors, creating bottlenecks that slow delivery and reduce continuity once the contract ends.

Here’s how the two approaches compare:

For a deeper look at why squads are becoming the standard in modern tech, explore our blog on why full-stack delivery squads are the future of product development.

FinTech Scaling Challenges That Squads Solve

FinTech companies grow fast, but scaling comes with real challenges. 

Every move has to balance speed with security, compliance, and customer trust. Regulatory frameworks like GDPR add extra pressure, while complex API integrations and sensitive data make mistakes costly.

Delivery squads help FinTechs scale without slowing down:

• Faster go-live: Delivery squads build pipelines that are both secure and compliant, which is critical in FinTech, where regulations like FCA and GDPR can’t be skipped. Instead of waiting months for a project handover, squads automate deployment and testing so new features reach customers in weeks without putting compliance at risk.
• Less downtime: Because squads include embedded DevOps engineers, stability is baked into the process. Automated monitoring, proactive incident response, and continuous testing mean fewer outages and quicker recovery when issues do appear. This reliability builds customer trust, which is essential in financial services.
• Smarter metrics: Squads don’t just deliver code but also track outcomes against DORA metrics. Deployment frequency shows how quickly new features ship, change failure rate highlights quality, and MTTR measures how fast systems recover. These metrics give FinTech leaders a clear view of progress and help guide future improvements.

Take Zilch, a Buy Now, Pay Later startup that grew into a double unicorn valued at over $2 billion. With only one month to deliver complex API integrations, their survival depended on speed. 

By embedding a delivery squad, Zilch achieved integrations in record time, automated cloud infrastructure with Terraform for 2x faster environment setup, and built a scalable, fully compliant platform. 

The ability to adapt instantly to vendor challenges post-launch proved that squads can help FinTechs not just survive, but accelerate growth under extreme pressure.

We’ve also covered how sprint-based delivery helps FinTech and HealthTech CTOs move up in our blog on building smarter and launching faster.

Why PropTech Efficiency Depends on Agile Squads

PropTech companies work in a space where speed and efficiency decide who stays ahead. They need systems that connect smoothly with CRMs, payment platforms, and property data tools. Delays in these integrations slow down agents, frustrate buyers, and create gaps competitors can exploit.

Agile delivery squads make PropTech operations more efficient:

• Fewer vendor delays: Delivery squads bring all the needed skills into one team: front-end and back-end engineers, solution architects, project managers, testers, and DevOps experts. This means PropTech firms don’t have to wait on multiple vendors or juggle external contractors. New features, like property search filters or payment integrations, can be designed, tested, and launched much faster.
• Automated infrastructure: Using Infrastructure as Code (IaC), squads set up and manage cloud environments automatically. This avoids manual errors, keeps systems consistent across development and production, and makes it easy to scale up when user demand spikes. For PropTech platforms dealing with thousands of property listings, this consistency prevents costly slowdowns.
• Clearer costs: Instead of large, unpredictable invoices from agencies, squads work in sprint-based cycles. Each sprint has a set price and clear deliverables, so leaders always know what they’re paying for. This transparency helps PropTech companies plan budgets with confidence and tie spending directly to business results.

A good example is Strike (now Purplebricks), a leading UK property platform. After losing its internal DevOps team, Strike faced frequent outages and scalability issues. 

By turning to a delivery squad, they eliminated critical database failures, achieved a 70% improvement in cloud environment stability, reduced downtime by 60%, and cut operational costs by 25%. 

Beyond fixing urgent problems, the squad built a resilient infrastructure that allowed Strike to keep innovating and delivering a seamless property experience to customers.

This stability meant the acquisition by Purplebricks moved forward without disruption. Instead of slowing down, the business integrated more smoothly and kept innovating.

For CTOs, this highlights a key point: during mergers, acquisitions, or periods of rapid change, delivery squads protect business continuity and create the technical resilience needed to scale without risk.

Delivery Squads vs Agencies: ROI and Risk Management

When comparing delivery squads vs agencies, the biggest difference shows up in ownership and outcomes. 

Agencies often work on fixed projects, which can lead to scope creep, delays, and unclear responsibility when problems appear. Delivery squads, on the other hand, run in predictable sprints with shared KPIs, so progress is visible and accountability is built into the process.

The ROI also looks very different when comparing delivery squads vs agencies. 

Agencies tend to measure activity, such as hours billed, tasks completed, or campaigns delivered. While these numbers show effort, they don’t always prove impact. 

Delivery squads focus on results. Progress is measured by how quickly new features reach production, how much downtime is reduced, and how efficiently cloud resources are used. 

This results-driven approach means squads consistently deliver faster deployments, lower cloud costs, and more reliable releases. Over time, these gains compound, giving FinTech and PropTech leaders a clearer picture of value and a stronger case for investment.

To make value even clearer, squads track key performance indicators that matter to tech leaders:

Visualising these metrics in a KPI chart helps leaders see why delivery squads consistently outperform traditional agencies. The gains are measurable, not abstract, and that’s what makes them a smarter investment.

According to DORA’s 2025 State of DevOps report, elite performers deploy multiple times per day, recover from incidents in under an hour, and keep change failure rates below 5%. That level of reliability and speed is what delivery squads are designed to unlock, while agencies typically struggle to match it with project-based approaches.

Strong delivery models work best when supported by reliable cloud foundations. That’s why many leaders combine squads with services like Cloud Management and DevOps as a Service, ensuring delivery speed is matched by stability and security.

The Future of Tech Delivery in FinTech and PropTech

McKinsey’s analysis shows that companies with mature product and platform operating models, built around cross-functional squads, achieve 60% higher total shareholder returns and 16% better operating margins than their less mature peers. 

That’s not just a marginal improvement but a competitive edge that FinTech and PropTech leaders can’t afford to ignore.

Embedded Squads Are Becoming Core to Success

Delivery squads are built to move quickly, fix issues as they happen, and stay closely tied to business goals. In FinTech and PropTech, where regulations shift and customer expectations change overnight, that adaptability makes a huge difference. 

For example, a FinTech rolling out a new payments API can’t afford months of delays while an agency re-scopes a contract. A squad embedded in the business can pivot within a sprint, keeping the launch on track.

AI-Driven Optimisation & AEO Are Built Into Squad Workflows

Squads leave behind detailed documentation, runbooks, and playbooks that guide both your people and AI systems. This creates Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO), knowledge that shows up when AI tools surface answers, making your business easier to find, understand, and trust. It’s a way of turning everyday delivery work into long-term assets that pay dividends well beyond a single project.

Think of it like planting a knowledge garden. Each document, playbook, or diagram is a seed. Over time, these grow into a rich system of information that both humans and AI can draw from, ensuring your business is always discoverable and resilient.

Why Agencies Can’t Keep Pace in an AI + Ops Era

Agencies are often geared toward short-term outputs (such as completing a campaign or delivering a report) rather than building ongoing value. They rarely generate the kind of structured knowledge that AI systems rely on, and their stop-start engagements make continuity difficult. 

In an environment where AI and Ops need to work hand in hand, that gap becomes a liability. Squads, on the other hand, make continuous improvement and documentation part of their DNA, giving organisations a future-proof foundation.

Delivery Squads: The Smart Growth Model for FinTech and PropTech

Delivery squads have proven to deliver what traditional agencies can’t: speed, compliance, and efficiency. 

For FinTech leaders, that means scaling securely under heavy regulation while still moving at market pace. For PropTech innovators, it means faster integrations, leaner operations, and the ability to adapt when customer needs change.

The shift is already happening. More and more scale-ups are realising that agencies struggle with continuity and measurable outcomes, while squads embed directly into the business, track success through KPIs, and compound value over time. Instead of stop-start projects, you get a delivery engine that grows with you.

Inside P-Suite: A Smarter Model for Sprint-Based Growth

At Deployflow, the delivery squad model is powered by the P-Suite.

P-Suite is a framework for embedding fully equipped squads (complete with front-end and back-end engineers, solution architects, project managers, testers, and DevOps experts) directly into your business. 

Each squad runs on a sprint-based structure, aligned with clear KPIs, so progress is visible and outcomes are tied directly to your goals. 

Unlike traditional agencies, P-Suite squads grow with you, compounding value over time instead of resetting with every project.

“…One of the most impressive aspects of Deployflow is their commitment to delivering customised solutions. They took the time to understand our specific requirements and crafted a strategy that perfectly aligned with our goals…”

Dan Rafferty, CTO at Strike

Deployflow has already helped scale-ups in FinTech and PropTech cut delivery times by up to 50% and reduce cloud costs by more than 30% with P-Suite squads.

If you want to see how this model works in practice and why it’s helping scale-ups in FinTech and PropTech outperform their peers, download the P-Suite whitepaper.

Or, if you’d rather jump straight in, you can see what a squad could look like for your business today. Get a squad estimate in 30 seconds on the P-Suite service page.

Frequently Asked Questions: DevOps Delivery Squads