Introducing Hive Quality Engineering: A new era in payments testing & consultancy
A new force in payments testing and compliance support has launched. Hive Quality Engineering is a specialist consultancy dedicated to helping banks, fintechs, and financial institutions streamline payments certification, ensure consistency and certainty of change in an ever more complex regulatory environment with enhanced quality engineering (QE). With deep industry expertise, cutting-edge solutions and innovative partnerships, Hive is set to transform how financial organisations tackle payments challenges.
Why Hive?
The company was founded in Leeds in February 2025 by Sean Beesting and Neill McCarthy. Having spent years working with industry leaders like Visa and IBM, Sean saw 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.
Hive helps businesses streamline their payments SQE and compliance processes, to move faster, reduce risk, and focus on innovation at pace whilst achieving higher quality business outcomes.
What We Do
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 a 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 clearly 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. We know, therefore, that there is a real need for streamlined and reliable quality engineering and testing solutions. Our goal is 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.”
The Hive Approach: Better Together
The name Hive isn’t just a nod to founder Sean’s surname—it reflects their entire philosophy and approach to business. Much like a natural hive, the culture is built around bringing together clients, experts, technology and strategic partnerships to bring better collective value for clients.
Meet the Leadership Team
Joining Sean Beesting on this journey is co-founder Neill McCarthy, Hive’s CTO—a long-time industry colleague and expert in quality engineering. Neill has over 30 years’ experience in the test and QE space and a decade in the BFSI payments technology domain.
Also supporting Hive’s operations is Philip Beesting, who will take on the role of Operations Director, bringing extensive business experience to ensure Hive runs efficiently and scales effectively.
This is just the beginning of the journey, and the team is excited to shape the future of payments testing and compliance. Follow us for updates, and if you’re a financial institution looking to improve your payments SQE or interested in knowing more about opportunities to work with us, get in touch—we’d love to chat.
