Behind the code: Why safety is the secret to speed

Principal Safety Manager, James Pettican, leads this month’s technology deep dive, examining our shift from conventional ‘gatekeeping’ to fostering a ‘Safer State of Mind’.

By embedding risk management into our DNA, we aren’t just making things more secure, we’re making them faster. Here is a look behind the curtain at how Atom’s Safety Team is redefining control in a digital world.

Safety as an instinct

Picture the scene, you are standing at the side of a busy road looking to cross. Without thinking, you look both ways. If you’re driving and see a pedestrian near the curb, your foot instinctively twitches toward the brake.

Safety is second nature. From birth, we learn to assess and manage risk until it becomes effortless. Yet, in many organisations, governance and risk are seen as the opposite of instinct. They are often viewed as “hoops to jump through” or a complex language understood only by specialists. At Atom, we believe risk management should feel as natural as looking both ways before crossing the street.

The brake pedal paradox

Imagine you’re driving and you squeeze the brake pedal, but nothing happens. That moment of panic immediately changes how you drive so you slow down, or you stop entirely. It’s a simple truth; if you can’t trust your controls, you can’t go as fast as you’d like. If you aren’t confident in the checks and balances of your code, you have to watch it move at a crawl. Conversely, when you trust your brakes, you can go faster. This is the core of the Sooner Safer Happier movement: safety and speed are a synergy, not a contest. Safety enables speed.

Embedding the ‘Safer State of Mind’

To turn this philosophy into reality, our Safety Team focuses on four pillars that allow our engineers to move with confidence:

• Lean Control: Safety is not one-size fits all or a box-ticking exercise. Our safety controls are designed to be appropriate to the situation, to flex to differing circumstances, and to be as low impact as possible.
• Automation by design: Instead of manual approvals, we build controls directly into our automation. When the system handles the checks, we can trust the outcome and spend our time maintaining our standards, not assessing every single change..
• Shifting left: By embedding checks into our delivery processes from the very start, we avoid the bottleneck at the end of a project.
• Consistent solutions: By approaching safety as a central, holistic theme, we find shared solutions to common problems, reducing the need for repetitive conversations and meetings.

The results

By adopting this “Safer State of Mind,” we are seeing a fundamental shift in how we ship software. We’ve moved toward more standard changes and predictable releases and far fewer Change Advisory Boards (CABs). The result? More predictable releases and significantly fewer failed changes.

What’s next?

We are constantly refining these principles to ensure that every update we ship makes our customers’ financial lives easier and more secure. Want to see our latest work in action? Explore the Atom App and let us know what you think of our latest updates!