Xinja shuts off public access to its roadmap

Xinja has closed its public roadmap after delays in delivering some of the action items on it, which it attributed to shifting business priorities and a lack of development resources.

Xinja neobank smartphone and app

In a blog posted today, Xinja co-founder and customer experience director Camilla Cooke wrote that closing the Trello-based roadmap would allow the neobank more flexibility to change course when needed. 

“We don’t want to go on setting expectations that we might not meet," Cooke wrote.

Circumstances and direction can change. We want to keep some information to ourselves for competitive reasons.

“You have to adapt to the market conditions you’re in. It’s the nature of a startup.”  

The bank unveiled its roadmap in July last year, prior to the launch of its bank account, as a way to let customers know what features were coming and to allow them to upvote features based on their priorities. 

After initially sticking to the public roadmap, in 2020 the neobank started to build Dabble, a US share trading platform, and infrastructure for its personal lending products, which added delays to the original timelines.

“These are in fact entire businesses in their own right but we erred on the side of optimism with the timings we gave,” Cooke wrote.   

“We had anticipated having a much bigger development team from the middle of Q2 2020 but COVID put paid to that, and insufficient resource meant we couldn’t focus on bank account features as well. So everything on the roadmap slipped back.”  

In March Xinja announced it had raised $433 million from Dubai-based World Investments in return for a 40 percent stake.

However, in May the Australian Financial Review reported the World Investment funds were "going to take a lot longer to get here thanks to COVID, as the UAE regulators have almost slowed to a halt". 

The bank says its personal lending products and US share trading platform will be live soon and that it intends to complete “hygiene features” such as new payments platform (NPP) enablement to complete the bank account product.