5 real examples of offshoring solving challenges

In 2020, a Deloitte survey found that 70% of tech leaders said cost reduction was their primary reason for moving offshore. In 2024, it had shrunk to only 34% with multiple other factors taking increasing slices of the pie. Despite these changes, offshoring is still predicted to grow at a 12.5% CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) from $120 billion in 2023 to $389.7 billion by 2033 (Statista). 

These data points reflect the trend of offshoring transitioning from being a tool to solve talent and cost issues to a strategy for solving product-development challenges. 

In this article, we’ll cover the five most common product-development challenges we hear tech leaders seeking to solve with offshoring and provide examples of businesses that have solved these challenges themselves. 

Product performance and scalability

53% of users will abandon a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. And 86% of users have uninstalled an app due to poor performance, according to The App Attention Span study. 

No company sets out to create underperforming platforms, but a combination of factors can see it creep up on any organisation. 

When performance does become an issue, many companies just don’t have the existing bandwidth to address it and keep delivering improvements.  

That’s where offshoring can help. By expanding your team or setting up a new team to develop a green or brownfield solution, you can solve the underlying issues while still satisfying user requests. While you could do this with a local team, one of the main advantages of offshoring is that you can get more for your budget, enabling you to see results sooner. 

Australian ready meal delivery company sets up offshore team to tackle backlog 

An Australian meal delivery service needed to scale their development to tackle their growing tech debt while they kept pushing forward with user-facing enhancements. They had tried to scale their software development using outsourcing, but the low quality and lack of integration with their local development team meant it was costing them more time and money to fix than it solved. 

They set up an integrated team with The Scalers, and the difference was immediate. As the new team was embedded within the company’s existing set up and culture, the new devs were able to get to grips with the product and code fast. Soon, they were tackling both big fixes and delivering small but meaningful enhancements, working through the company’s backlog. 

This allowed the company to deal with their tech debt and performance issues and push their roadmap forward. A notable enhancement was a new integration between their platform and back office, providing instant data transfer. These improvements were only possible thanks to the quality of the offshore team and their integration with the company’s culture.   

Technical debt and architecture modernisation

Tech debt is the number one problem facing CTOs in 2025, according to a recent survey from STXnext. In fact, 90% of IT decision makers say that legacy tech is holding back innovation. 

While technical debt is a reality of any software development project, it all too often can get out of control. What once might have been a quick fix can become one of a string of issues requiring a serious code refactor. It’s one of the main reasons that established companies can be overtaken by new upstarts. 

Increasing the size of a development team creates the capacity to tackle tech debt, but it can also make the problem worse. Firstly, larger teams are usually expected to lead to increased velocity, and tech leads who’ve struggled to prioritise tackling tech debt in the past often tend to do so with larger teams. Even worse, larger teams need greater coordination, and without the correct systems in place, tech debt can increase exponentially.  

With that said, your tech debt won’t magically disappear on its own! Increasing the size of your development team may well be the only way to provide the bandwidth to follow the correct processes and systems to manage tech debt. 

Here’s an example of how one company used offshoring to tackle their tech debt problem.  

Irish Fintech launches next-gen version of platform with offshore team

Fintua’s (previously Taxback Group) codebases had been written in VB 20 years ago. They first approached The Scalers as a string of new competitors had entered the market, and they were unable to match their features using their current tech stack. They wanted to set up a greenfield solution based on .NET that would allow them to compete again. 

They were using an outsourcing partner already, but it was focused solely on VB, and they couldn’t or wouldn’t add .NET to their abilities. 

They set up an initial scrum team and got their new platform set up in just 6 months. With that foundation in place, they expanded with an additional scrum team before growing to a 40-person offshore development centre. This offshore hub has allowed them to deliver feature parity with their rivals, deliver innovations faster, and avoid losing marketing share.    

Digital transformation implementation

89% of businesses have adopted or plan to adopt a digital-first approach, according to Joget. However, only 30% of digital transformation initiatives successfully meet their objective, according to a report from McKinsey. 

As noted in a recent TEKsystems report, these failures come from a variety of challenges, many of which are connected to a business’s structure and culture, such as complex existing ecosystems, siloed mindsets, and a lack of decision-maker buy-in. However, 22% of companies lack the technical skills to deliver projects, while unforeseen costs have affected 25% of businesses. 

The top five digital transformation goals in 2025

To gain the technical skills they need without a significant impact on their budget, many companies look to different offshoring models for ways to access experts at lower costs. Here’s one example of a company that became digital-first thanks to its offshore team.  

PEI transforms from a legacy media to a data platform 

PEI had a long history of providing market data via media channels. They saw the opportunity to digitally transform and provide their data insight via a client-facing platform. This would unlock new revenue streams. 

As they had no existing in-house development set up, they turned to outsourcing providers to get their Proof of Concept in place with the goal of setting up their own team offshore to take over development if the investment proved worthwhile, which it did. 

The CTO had worked with The Scalers previously, so he commissioned them to set up an offshore scrum team, which he personally onboarded into the new platform. Over the next year, this fledgling team continued to deliver enhancements as PEI’s new offering took off and revenue grew. 

Now, PEI has become a digital-first company, continuing its subscriber-based data insights business but with a higher value offering. Their team now consists of over 30 Engineers, Testers, and Analysts who are continuing to develop and focus on new ways to drive value to their users. 

Product security and compliance

The average data breach costs a company $4.4 million, according to the IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025. Meanwhile, 2,245 GDPR fines were issued in 2024, highlighting the growing costs of compliance. 

More organised crime outfits and malicious state actors are exploiting security vulnerabilities, with cases such as Jaguar Land Ranger, M&S, and Harrods department store in the last year alone. 

You might be surprised to see security as one of the challenges offshoring solves for businesses, as the thought of trusting a team in another country with sensitive data and systems can seem counterintuitive. This mistaken impression often comes from the myths around offshoring and the confusion with outsourcing, where a team works under a different vendor. The reality is more obvious. 

More companies are looking to hire security specialists and compliance experts to ensure standards are met and best practices are followed. Offshoring provides a cost-effective way to find and onboard experts with these skills and can help update legacy infrastructure that can be vulnerable to attack points. 

allpay security implementation example

allpay is a payment processing company based in the UK, and so security and compliance are always top priority. To ensure they can not only meet requirements but also be a leader in security, they needed to address local talent shortages as experts were lacking in those skills. 

The skills and employees were only half the challenge, however, as the office space and equipment their offshore team would use also needed to meet strict standards and practices to ensure data protection. For example, office spaces needed to be locked with 24/7 surveillance and operate on secure private networks in addition to the usual requirements. Equipment needed to be locked down at the head office in the UK before being dispatched to their new offshore employees. 

By offshoring to Bangalore with The Scalers, they managed to find the experts they needed and meet their industry’s security standards. Their new team has managed to achieve a 30% reduction in transaction errors while ensuring their security is airtight. 

Innovation and new technology integration

Meta recently had to deny that they were willing to pay $100m as a signing bonus to AI engineers. While untrue, the actual signing bonuses are still incredible and show the challenge companies outside the Big 4 of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Apple face in adopting the latest technology and innovations. 

Obviously, finding and convincing quality candidates with these in-demand skills to join your company is a real challenge, especially in the UK, where talent shortages are rife and salaries are high. Moving offshore provides levers that can help address these issues. Firstly, the larger talent pool size means there are more Engineers with those skills. More importantly, by hiring offshore, smaller companies can compete with the salaries offered by larger companies. 

Peer-to-peer marketplace implements AI enhancements with an offshore team

A leading Dutch peer-to-peer study material marketplace has been around since 2010. With the boom in AI, they have sought to leverage generative LLMs and Machine Learning algorithms to deliver greater value to their users. However, they faced a dual barrier: their existing team was overwhelmed with ongoing support, and they couldn’t find the specialists they needed (at a cost they could afford) in their local Dutch market. So they set up an offshore team in Bangalore with The Scalers. 

Now, they have a team of specialists who are working on the architecture of their platform to leverage these tools properly. The first fruits of this work have been the improved search and suggestions that are being surfaced to users as they browse. 

Solving operational challenges through strategic offshoring

Offshoring isn’t a plug-and-play solution to any problem. It can bring its own offshoring challenges (and solutions) too. However, when done right, it is an effective strategy that can be leveraged to solve a multitude of challenges beyond just the examples listed above. 

If you have a software development challenge and want to know if offshoring can help address it, send us a message. One of our experts will get back to you to help you assess your options and make an informed decision.