If your goal as a tech company is to use open standards to break through complexity and regulation, you could do worse than landing Tom Bishop as your CTO.

That was one of

’s successes last year. After launching with a $3 million seed round, the company hired Bishop in June to spearhead its use of the blockchain to create user friendly financial services.

Bishop's been applying open standards since he was Vice President of UNIX International during the Unix Wars of the late 80s. Since then, he’s led development teams everywhere from startups to IBM, and served as CTO at eight companies, earning a spot on InfoWorld’s Top 25 CTOs list in 2004.

At the time, he was CTO of VIEO, an Austin company that makes control systems for end-to-end application management. It was the second company where he worked with Will Hurley, who later founded Honest Dollar and knew just who to ask when he needed a CTO. We chatted with him about what technologies are currently helping Honest Dollar grow. 

What technologies power your business?

We’re pretty much a pure Google Cloud shop, so our list of technologies is heavily influenced by Google’s Cloud Platform. Google Container Engine, Google Compute Engine, Kubernetes, Google persistent disks supporting a Gluster file system cluster, Google Cloud Monitoring. It’s been great to leverage Google’s extensive experience as a pioneer in the cloud space, and the support they provide to us across the board has been excellent.

Our infrastructure is all written in go as stateless micro services, our web apps based on Angular.js, our iOS app based on Swift, and our Android app based on Java, and our database is Cassandra. We use Signal Sciences for our security monitoring.

Finally, we leverage a whole host of third-party SaaS services for things like identity and bank account verification, payment, and custodian services, without which we couldn’t do what we do.

What technologies are playing the biggest roles at your company this year?

ElasticSearch, Blockchain (application of distributed ledger), Angular2, fully leveraging the mobile experience (both iOS and Android) for financial services (especially payment and investment services), responsive web design, real-time compliance and security monitoring, and AI/big data.

What are the biggest tech projects your team is working on this year?

We’re pursuing projects in several dimensions:

1. Applying the capabilities of blockchain to enable us to continue to drive cost and complexity out of — and transparency into — the financial services industry, especially in the areas of broker-dealer custodianship.
2. Relentless pursuit of the X experience in web and mobile technology to bring cutting edge financial services to everyone who wants and needs them.
3. Fully embedding automated compliance/security into our infrastructure and financial services platform.
4. Continuing the evolution of our software development and delivery processes for continuous cloud deployment.

What are the biggest technology challenges you’ve faced in the past? How did you overcome them?

Like all technology-based companies, there’s always the concern about the effects of the innovator’s dilemma. That occurs when we adopt the very latest technologies for our initial build-out, and then are challenged to divide our time between enhancing and perfecting the product we’ve already built and justifying the cost, time and distractions of migrating to newer technologies.

Following the principles of “that which gets measured, gets done,” I recognize that key technology initiatives require a presence on our product development roadmap to make sure sufficient attention and resources are actually spent on them.

Some responses were edited for length and clarity.

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