Every technology organisation has a backlog of broken dreams. Someone in operations needs a small dashboard. Someone in the middle office wants two systems to talk to each other. Someone in compliance needs a report that does not yet exist. None of it is hard, but all of it sits behind the client-facing work that, quite rightly, comes first — so it waits months, sometimes years. In the meantime people do what people do: they build something horrifying in Excel, held together with nested VLOOKUPs and hope.
AI-assisted “vibe coding” changes the economics of that backlog. Tools that turn a plain-language description into working code let the person who actually has the problem build a first version of the solution, without waiting for a developer to be freed up. Across a business of 700-plus people, with a technology team of around 230, that is a meaningful release of pressure. We actively encourage people in operations, compliance and the middle office to experiment.
The obvious objection — this is exactly how you end up with ungoverned code touching regulated systems — is the right one. The answer is not to forbid it but to put a frame around it. Four guardrails do most of the work:
- Governed APIs. Controlled, authenticated, authorised access points — never direct database access — so there is no path to quietly exfiltrate data.
- Managed environments. Tools run in monitored spaces the firm can see, not as forgotten processes on someone's laptop.
- Version control. Git matters most for the non-developers: it means a failed iteration is a revert, not a catastrophe, and there is always a history of what changed.
- Shared knowledge. A common repository of what has been built, so five teams don't quietly solve the same problem five different ways.
None of this turns an operations analyst into a software engineer, and it is not meant to. Vibe coding does not replace developers for the core platform — the systems that move client money still demand the full discipline. What it does is dissolve the everyday operational friction that used to be nobody's priority, while keeping the controls a regulated firm cannot do without. The real job of leadership here is not to say no. It is to find the responsible way to say yes.