“Because before, you could probably argue that the coding part was the bottleneck in our kind of product lifecycle. But now … is doing all the coding. And when he took over the coding, we found that the requirement part, the first part, is the new bottleneck. Because me and …, we can be tied up in some prioritized work. And then a product owner creates a new feature or a feature request in an Epic in the boards. And we won't kind of look at that before some time has passed. And then we have some questions, clarifications. And the product owner might not even remember what she wanted the first place when she wrote it. And it becomes this async ping-pong where you kind of try to figure out what to do. And you're not able to begin the implementation.”
Hallstein Brøtan, Senior consultant, Novanet; developer on Nordic Corporate Bank's system. Works on the team that built and runs the agent he describes, so he is first-hand on how it works and what it produced; the pull request counts and cost are his own estimates from the team's own stats page, not audited, and his employer Novanet sells AI services.
How this was checked
Checked against the source by a first reader, then confirmed independently by a second reader who fetched the source without seeing the first reader's notes (Independent review agent (Claude Sonnet), blind second pass from passage text and citation only, no repository access, 2026-11-08).
Whisper matches word for word near 09:50. The '…' parts replace 'Nisko' and 'Leon' (names).
How to cite this passage
Hallstein Brøtan (Nordic Corporate Bank), “How We Built an Autonomous Development Workflow at Nordic Corporate Bank”, NDC Conferences (YouTube); talk recorded at NDC in Oslo, 2026-06-29, at 09:50. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8M8--12h1Y Archived at https://the-ai-record.com/passages/nordic-corporate-bank-requirements-became-the-bottleneck-2026
Context. The speaker shows the team's monthly pull request chart and gives the figure for the first month after the agent went to production and the year-earlier figure.
Context. Asked how the team dares to run an autonomous agent in a bank, the speaker describes a test in which he tried to get the agent to hand over production customer data.
Context. A consultant on the bank's two-person development team says when they started the coding agent and that they have not written code by hand since.
Context. Answering a question about taking the human out of the loop, the speaker says a person still approves the agent's pull requests and what would change that.
Nordic Corporate Bank