Hive Quality Engineering, founded by SQE professionals Sean Beesting and Neill McCarthy, supports financial institutions in delivering faster, more reliable, and regulation-ready payments systems.
With a bold mission to remove complexity from payment certification and quality assurance, Hive is set to transform how financial organisations tackle payments challenges. Their offering includes scalable testing services and consultancy that help banks, fintechs, and global payment providers achieve certainty in change and confidence in release cycles.
“There’s never been more pressure on financial organisations to adapt quickly while ensuring quality and compliance,” said Sean Beesting, CEO and Co-Founder of Hive. “We built Hive to solve this problem—bringing speed, certainty, and confidence to every step of the payments testing journey.”
Having spent years working with industry leaders like Visa and IBM, Sean has seen first-hand the inefficiencies and delays that traditional payments testing processes create. Too often, financial organisations struggle to get to market quickly, adapt at speed, and maintain confidence in their testing and release cycles.
The Yorkshire-based start-up is unique in offering true end-to-end payments testing alongside tailored quality engineering (QE) services to help financial institutions streamline their payment testing, enabling faster times to revenue with higher business confidence and better client outcomes.
Alongside expert consultancy, Hive also offers scalable Testing as a Service (TaaS), and regulatory compliance advisory services to keep businesses ahead of evolving global standards. Services also include QE automation, agile and DevOps QE support, performance and load testing to optimise real-time transactions and AI-driven automation to enhance efficiency and fraud prevention.
Commenting on the business’ launch, Sean Beesting said: “I was fortunate enough to learn a significant amount about the payments industry during my time at Visa and just how challenging it is for organisations when it comes to their payments testing. There are various reasons for this, but they all impact their ability to get to market quickly or adapt and change their payment platforms at pace while ensuring certainty in the quality of the release.
"Therefore, we know that there is a real need for streamlined and reliable quality engineering and testing solutions. We aim to meet this need, remove any complexity, instil confidence, and drive innovation in the financial payments sector.”
“Though we work internationally and much of the financial services sector is London-centric, we are proud to be incorporated in Yorkshire, which has a long history of strong financial brands and, more recently, has been a technology powerhouse with a significant number of technology businesses grown in this part of the Northern Powerhouse.”