Cardinal, operational risk platform
How Cardinal turned its entire team into builders
- 80%
- Employees actively using Kosuke every day
- +55%
- Opened PRs per month
- 94%
- Of merged PRs are built with Kosuke
- 30 mins
- From idea to first preview
01 / About Cardinal
Turning operational risk into a measurable system
Cardinal helps banks, payment providers, and other regulated institutions measure operational risk. Its on-premises platform uses prediction markets, AI agents, and pairwise comparisons to turn expert judgment into auditable risk rankings.
02 / The bottleneck
The roadmap was clear. Every change still joined a queue.
Cardinal's small tech team supported a busy sales pipeline. Sales conversations kept bringing new product requests, but engineers could only tackle a few at a time while maintaining the core platform. The ideas were there; the time was not, so valuable features and fixes sat in the backlog for too long.
Backlog
4Prospect request
Enterprise SSO
Prospect request
Custom report exports
Prospect request
Bulk data upload
Prospect request
Flexible approval workflows
In progress
2Prospect request
Risk filters by business unit
Prospect request
Reviewer notes on reports
Ready for review
1Prospect request
Duplicate an assessment
03 / The workflow
Same engineering process. More people able to contribute.
Cardinal non-technical teammates could turn customer feedback into working changes, with every result landing as a pull request for engineer review.
Pull requests opened per week
+55%
Opened PRs per month
04 / In their words
The queue disappeared. Review control did not.
"Our backlog was full of bug fixes and features that never made it to production. Now our product team ships them directly. Engineers just review the PRs. We cleared months of backlog in weeks."
Nicolas Espinoza
CEO, Cardinal
"I review more pull requests than I used to write, and the codebase is better for it. Nothing merges without one of us reading it, and that was true before Kosuke too. What changed is that the queue in front of us disappeared."
Alessandro Micagni
Product, Cardinal
Everyone ships. Engineers review.