Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
Pearl Coast FinTech has been operating in Mining & Metals for a while now, headquartered in Dubai, UAE. As Head of Digital Strategy I sit across both strategic planning and day-to-day technology delivery. We hold our vendors to a high bar because our own clients hold us to one — it's only fair to expect the same discipline from partners.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
Regulation in our Mining & Metals segment shifted and the compliance deadline came from the regulator, not from us. The scale of the Blockchain Development changes required justified bringing in a specialist rather than pulling our internal team off the product roadmap to handle it.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The scope ran the full Blockchain Development lifecycle — discovery, requirements, architecture, development across roughly a dozen sprints, integration testing, performance validation, deployment, and a four-week hypercare window afterward. They also handed over full documentation and ran a knowledge transfer session for our internal team.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
We were coming off a failed engagement and went into vendor selection this time with a lot more scrutiny. We asked pointed questions about how they handle scope changes, how they estimate, how they communicate bad news. The answers were specific and consistent across everyone we spoke to on their team, which gave us confidence it wasn't a rehearsed pitch.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Really well, partly because they already had Mining & Metals experience that cut down on the amount of context we had to provide. They knew the terminology, asked the right questions, and translated our business requirements into technical specs accurately enough that development barely needed any clarification cycles.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
The most structured project management I've dealt with from any outside vendor. Sprint planning was tight, acceptance criteria were specific, and retrospectives actually led to changes rather than just being a box to tick. The backlog and risk register were both treated as live tools, not paperwork. I never once had to chase a status update.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
On time and inside the approved budget. Their estimating was notably accurate — they'd broken the work down in enough detail during discovery that the forecast held up the whole way through, instead of drifting with every small change. We had exactly one change request, and it was for scope we added ourselves.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
Hard to isolate perfectly given everything else going on in the business, but the numbers we can attribute directly to the Blockchain Development work are solid: session duration up, conversion up, error rate down, and our NPS for that touchpoint has moved noticeably. Our account managers say it's coming up positively in client conversations now too.
What did you like most about working with this company?
Their instinct for never losing the business goal in the middle of technical decisions. I've worked with technically strong teams before who lose that thread once things get complicated. This team kept every architectural call tied back to the outcome we'd actually agreed to, which made the harder trade-off conversations a lot easier.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Without reservation. We're already in early conversations about a second engagement, and I expect this to turn into a multi-year relationship. Anyone in Mining & Metals looking for real Blockchain Development depth paired with actual delivery discipline should have this team near the top of their list.