Cantilever Reviews

Tokenisation project executed with precision and deep domain understanding

Antoine Lefevre / Directeur Technique - Lumiere Digital SAS

Verified
May 25, 2026

Project summary: Our wealth management platform was built on ten-year-old architecture and was starting to limit our ability to onboard new institutional clients with modern integration expectations.

Twelve weeks from kickoff to live production deployment for a project of this complexity. I would not have believed that was achievable if I had not watched them do it. The velocity came from genuine engineering discipline — clear requirements, short feedback loops, automated testing, and a team that communicated internally without the overhead that slows most agencies down. The product has been live for four months with no critical bugs and one minor patch. We are already in scoping conversations for phase two.

PROS

Consistent delivery against milestones, code quality that passed our internal review without major findings, post-launch support that felt like a partnership not a ticket queue

CONS

Time zone difference required some adjustment to our internal communication habits but the team managed the overlap window efficiently and it never affected momentum

5.0

Overall

5.0

Quality

5.0

Schedule

5.0

Cost

5.0

Communication

Project TypeBlockchain Development

IndustryFinancial Services

Project Cost$50,000 to $149,999

DurationSep 2025 – Nov 2025

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.

As Directeur Technique at Lumiere Digital SAS, I manage a cross-functional technology team serving our Financial Services clients from Paris, France. We are a commercially focused organisation and every technology decision we make is evaluated against a clear business case. We needed a partner who understood that context, not just the technical brief.

What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?

Our Financial Services regulatory environment had changed and the compliance timeline was non-negotiable. We needed to rebuild specific components of our system to meet the new requirements and our internal team was already fully committed to the core product roadmap. Bringing in a specialist Blockchain Development partner was the only realistic path.

What services did the company provide for your project?

The core engagement was Blockchain Development but expanded to include technical consultancy during the discovery phase, which helped us refine the requirements significantly before development began. They also took responsibility for coordinating with our third-party data providers, which removed a significant coordination burden from our internal team.

Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?

We evaluated four vendors in total. Two were eliminated after the technical assessment stage because their proposed architectures showed a surface-level understanding of what we needed. This team's proposal demonstrated genuine depth in Blockchain Development and specific knowledge of the Financial Services sector that the others could not match. The reference calls confirmed a consistent pattern of delivery.

How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?

Better than we did at the start, which sounds like an exaggeration but is genuinely accurate. The discovery workshop they ran surfaced assumptions we had not examined and contradictions in our requirements that would have caused real problems mid-development. The functional specification they produced was the clearest articulation of our product that we had seen written down.

How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?

The project management was the best I have experienced in a vendor relationship. We had fortnightly sprint reviews with structured agendas, a shared backlog that we could inspect at any point, a risk register that was actively maintained rather than created at kickoff and never opened again, and a project manager who treated our time as something worth protecting. Communication was proactive, not reactive.

Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?

Yes on both counts. There was one sprint where a third-party integration took longer than scoped because of undocumented API behaviour on the vendor side. The team flagged it immediately, proposed two mitigation options, and we agreed on an approach that recovered the timeline within two weeks. That is how scope issues should be handled and rarely are.

What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?

Hard to isolate precisely because several factors changed simultaneously, but the data we can attribute directly to the new Blockchain Development platform shows a meaningful improvement in the metrics that matter to our Financial Services business. Our account managers report that the new capability is coming up positively in client conversations, which was one of the strategic objectives we started with.

What did you like most about working with this company?

Their ability to hold the business objective in mind alongside the technical task. I have worked with technically excellent agencies who lost the thread of what we were actually trying to achieve. This team never did. Every architectural decision, every trade-off conversation, every prioritisation discussion was anchored to the outcome we had agreed at the start.

Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?

Absolutely. I would recommend them with a specific note that the quality of the discovery process is where the value starts. Clients who invest properly in that phase will get the most out of the engagement. We made that investment and the returns are evident in the quality of what was delivered.

A technology partner worth every penny of the investment

Charlotte Whitfield / Head of Digital Commerce - Sterling Retail PLC

Verified
May 03, 2024

Project summary: Our dealer network management system had not been meaningfully updated in eight years and was actively impeding our ability to support our distribution partners effectively.

I am a demanding client. I have a technical background, I review code, and I have high standards for documentation and testing. This team met all of those expectations without ever seeming defensive about scrutiny. Peer code reviews were welcomed, unit test coverage was genuine rather than performative, and the API documentation was thorough enough that our own developers integrated against it without a single clarification call. That level of craft is what I look for and rarely find.

PROS

Consistent delivery against milestones, code quality that passed our internal review without major findings, post-launch support that felt like a partnership not a ticket queue

CONS

Time zone difference required some adjustment to our internal communication habits but the team managed the overlap window efficiently and it never affected momentum

5.0

Overall

5.0

Quality

5.0

Schedule

5.0

Cost

5.0

Communication

Project TypeIndustry-Specific Solutions

IndustryAutomotive

Project CostLess than $10,000

DurationFeb 2025 – Mar 2026

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.

Sterling Retail PLC operates across the Automotive sector with offices in Manchester, UK. In my capacity as Head of Digital Commerce I oversee both the strategic and operational technology agenda. We are a growth-stage business that needed a development partner capable of scaling with us rather than constraining us.

What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?

The immediate trigger was a performance failure during our peak trading period that cost us measurably in both revenue and client trust. The root cause was architectural and our internal team did not have the Industry-Specific Solutions expertise to address it properly. We needed specialists.

What services did the company provide for your project?

Primarily Industry-Specific Solutions, though the scope naturally touched adjacent areas. They handled architecture design, implementation, integration with our existing systems, performance testing under realistic load, and knowledge transfer to our internal team. The breadth of what they covered without requiring us to bring in additional vendors was one of the reasons the project ran efficiently.

Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?

Price was a factor but not the deciding one. They were mid-range in our evaluation. What tipped it was the combination of their technical depth in Industry-Specific Solutions, the seniority of the team they proposed to assign to our account, and the clarity of their project governance model. We had been burned by an agency that overpromised before and we needed to see evidence of process maturity.

How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?

Better than we did at the start, which sounds like an exaggeration but is genuinely accurate. The discovery workshop they ran surfaced assumptions we had not examined and contradictions in our requirements that would have caused real problems mid-development. The functional specification they produced was the clearest articulation of our product that we had seen written down.

How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?

Communication was handled primarily asynchronously given the time zone difference between Manchester, UK and the team's base, but it was managed so well that the gap rarely felt like a constraint. Written updates were clear and timely, escalations were handled promptly, and we never had to chase for a status update. The cadence was exactly right — enough to feel informed, not so much that it created overhead.

Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?

The project landed on the agreed delivery date and within the approved budget. We did add scope during the engagement — two features that became apparent as essential during user testing — and those were quoted, approved, and delivered without affecting the original scope timeline. That kind of clean change management is not something you can take for granted.

What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?

The ROI case we presented to our board assumed a payback period of eighteen months. Based on current trajectory we will hit that in under a year. The efficiency gains in our Automotive operations have been more significant than the model projected, partly because the quality of the data coming out of the new system is enabling decisions we could not make before.

What did you like most about working with this company?

Their ability to hold the business objective in mind alongside the technical task. I have worked with technically excellent agencies who lost the thread of what we were actually trying to achieve. This team never did. Every architectural decision, every trade-off conversation, every prioritisation discussion was anchored to the outcome we had agreed at the start.

Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?

Absolutely. I would recommend them with a specific note that the quality of the discovery process is where the value starts. Clients who invest properly in that phase will get the most out of the engagement. We made that investment and the returns are evident in the quality of what was delivered.

Execution that matched the sales pitch — which is rarer than it should be

Maryam Al-Zahrani / Head of Innovation - Al-Salam Digital Solutions

Verified
Dec 16, 2023

Project summary: Post-pandemic recovery meant rebuilding our booking infrastructure from scratch with a focus on flexibility, cancellation handling, and real-time inventory across multiple GDS providers.

The engagement started with a discovery workshop that immediately signalled this team was different. They pushed back on two of our assumptions in the first session with evidence and a better alternative. That kind of intellectual honesty is rare and it set the tone for the whole project. Deliverables were consistently ahead of schedule, code reviews were taken seriously, and the final product is something we are proud to show enterprise clients during due diligence calls.

PROS

Engineering quality that our internal team can maintain without calling the vendor, thorough documentation, proactive risk identification throughout the project

CONS

The initial project brief document they required was more detailed than we were used to providing, but in hindsight that rigour was part of why the project ran so smoothly

5.0

Overall

5.0

Quality

5.0

Schedule

5.0

Cost

5.0

Communication

Project TypeIndustry-Specific Solutions

IndustryTravel & Hospitality

Project Cost$150,000 to $499,999

DurationOct 2025 – Jan 2026

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.

I lead technology at Al-Salam Digital Solutions, a mid-sized organisation in the Travel & Hospitality sector headquartered in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. My remit as Head of Innovation covers everything from infrastructure to product development. We had reached a point where our internal engineering capacity was not sufficient to execute our roadmap without an experienced external partner.

What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?

Our existing Industry-Specific Solutions capability had accumulated years of technical debt that was slowing every new feature to a crawl. Incident frequency was rising, developer confidence was falling, and we knew a rebuild was overdue. We needed a partner with the depth to do it properly rather than apply another layer of patches.

What services did the company provide for your project?

The core engagement was Industry-Specific Solutions but expanded to include technical consultancy during the discovery phase, which helped us refine the requirements significantly before development began. They also took responsibility for coordinating with our third-party data providers, which removed a significant coordination burden from our internal team.

Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?

We evaluated four vendors in total. Two were eliminated after the technical assessment stage because their proposed architectures showed a surface-level understanding of what we needed. This team's proposal demonstrated genuine depth in Industry-Specific Solutions and specific knowledge of the Travel & Hospitality sector that the others could not match. The reference calls confirmed a consistent pattern of delivery.

How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?

Thorough and precise. They translated our business language into technical requirements without losing the intent, which is a skill that sounds straightforward but frequently goes wrong. Every user story they wrote was reviewed against the original business objective before it entered the sprint and the acceptance criteria were specific enough to remove subjectivity from QA.

How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?

Professional and efficient. We used a shared project management tool that gave our stakeholders visibility without requiring them to attend every meeting. The project manager had a clear escalation path and used it appropriately. The only time I needed to intervene directly was when I chose to, not because something had been missed.

Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?

Yes. I will note that the original timeline was aggressive and I had privately expected a slip. They managed to hold it by making smart sequencing decisions early on that I only fully understood in retrospect. The budget discipline was equally good — we received a single change request for scope we had introduced ourselves and it was priced fairly.

What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?

We went live three months ago. In that time we have not had a single P1 incident, our page performance scores have improved across every measure, and the feature we had deprioritised for years because the old architecture made it too complex to implement is now in our next sprint. The platform they built has opened up our roadmap in a way we had not anticipated.

What did you like most about working with this company?

The post-launch behaviour. Some agencies disappear the moment the final invoice is paid. This team maintained the same level of responsiveness during the hypercare period as during development, handed over thorough documentation without being asked twice, and checked in proactively a month after go-live to review performance metrics with us. That last part was entirely unprompted.

Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?

Yes. The referral I would give comes with context: they are not the cheapest option and they are not the fastest to schedule. If you are optimising purely on price or looking for someone to start tomorrow, there are other choices. If you want the work done properly and a partner you can trust with a complex, high-stakes Industry-Specific Solutions engagement, this team is the answer.

Results that made the business case look conservative in hindsight

Travis Bennett / Managing Director, Tech - Irongate Capital

Verified
May 26, 2023

Project summary: Inter-agency data sharing had become a bottleneck and we needed a secure, auditable integration platform that met government security classification requirements.

Our industry has specific compliance requirements that many generalist agencies struggle with. This team came with working knowledge of the relevant frameworks, asked pointed questions about our obligations, and built controls into the architecture rather than bolting them on at the end. Our compliance team reviewed the delivered system and had only minor observations, which is genuinely unusual for a first-pass review. That domain awareness saved us significant remediation cost.

PROS

Engineering quality that our internal team can maintain without calling the vendor, thorough documentation, proactive risk identification throughout the project

CONS

The volume of quality documentation they produced was genuinely impressive but also meant our team needed dedicated time to review it properly — a minor process point, not a complaint

5.0

Overall

5.0

Quality

5.0

Schedule

5.0

Cost

5.0

Communication

Project TypeEmbedded Systems Development

IndustryGovernment & Public Sector

Project Cost$500,000+

DurationJul 2025 – Aug 2025

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.

Irongate Capital is a Government & Public Sector business based in Atlanta, USA. As Managing Director, Tech I am responsible for all technology investment decisions, vendor selection, and ensuring our digital capabilities match our growth ambitions. We operate in a competitive market where the quality of our software directly affects our ability to win and retain clients.

What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?

We had a product concept validated by market research but no clear path to build it within our budget and timeline constraints. Our Government & Public Sector competitors were moving quickly and we could not afford to spend eighteen months finding out a generalist agency could not execute the Embedded Systems Development work our product required.

What services did the company provide for your project?

Primarily Embedded Systems Development, though the scope naturally touched adjacent areas. They handled architecture design, implementation, integration with our existing systems, performance testing under realistic load, and knowledge transfer to our internal team. The breadth of what they covered without requiring us to bring in additional vendors was one of the reasons the project ran efficiently.

Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?

We evaluated four vendors in total. Two were eliminated after the technical assessment stage because their proposed architectures showed a surface-level understanding of what we needed. This team's proposal demonstrated genuine depth in Embedded Systems Development and specific knowledge of the Government & Public Sector sector that the others could not match. The reference calls confirmed a consistent pattern of delivery.