About Coastal
Where fintech speed meets bank-grade stability
Coastal is an innovative leader at the intersection of banking and fintech, pairing a traditional commercial bank with a banking-as-a-service platform that powers the development of new financial products. By combining regulated infrastructure with modern product development, Coastal enables partners to build and launch quickly in an industry where balancing speed and compliance is critical to success.
The challenge
Coastal needed a unified way to scale its operations across teams, systems, and external partnerships.
As Coastal expanded its fintech platform, coordination grew more complex across internal teams, systems, and external partners.
Important work, from campaign execution to compliance reviews and incident response, required multiple groups, often across the globe, to move in parallel while staying aligned. With communication spread across Microsoft Teams and email, it became harder to maintain consistent visibility. Conversations lived in different places, approvals happened across systems, and teams often had to switch tools to track progress.
Coastal saw an opportunity to bring conversations, workflows, and context into a more unified, shared environment — creating a clearer, more connected way for teams and partners to work together.
How Coastal works better with Slack
Turning async communication into coordinated action across teams, partners, and systems
To streamline communication across channels, Coastal adopted Slack as its central workspace — bringing together internal teams, external partners, and critical systems into one place.
Faster incident response with visibility and context
Operational incident response is one of Coastal’s most time-sensitive workflows — and one where Slack has made an immediate impact.
If an issue arises, Coastal’s engineering teams use dedicated Slack channels like #ccbx-incidents to bring stakeholders together in real time. Threads enable focused workstreams, so different parts of an issue can be tackled simultaneously without losing clarity.
“During an incident, you can have multiple groups working on different parts of the problem. Slack threads allow those conversations to happen in parallel,” said Abbott.
Coastal also uses integrations with tools like Datadog to surface alerts, runbooks, and system context directly in Slack — helping every conversation become part of a structured record. Teams can quickly reconstruct timelines, capture key milestones, and complete postmortems with far less manual effort.
“Communication channels dictate outcomes. The way teams communicate often determines how quickly problems get solved.”
Bringing partners, workflows, and approvals into one place
In a regulated environment where multiple stakeholders are involved for approvals, even routine work requires coordination across teams and organizations.
“Whether we’re launching campaigns, reviewing designs, or collaborating with partners, all our work happens in Slack,” said Almitra Inocencio, VP, Head of Marketing & Design.
Using Slack Connect, Coastal works directly with partners and global vendors in shared channels, making it easier to align, share updates, and move projects forward without delays.
Automated workflows help route requests to the right stakeholders, while keeping conversations and decisions centralized. Integrations with tools like Figma, Notion, and HubSpot bring updates and feedback directly into Slack, allowing teams to collaborate in real time while maintaining visibility across projects.
A platform for culture and connection
As Coastal transitioned from Microsoft Teams, their teams embraced Slack not just for coordination, but as a space for connection across a global workforce. With Slack on both desktop and mobile, teams can stay in sync and engaged throughout the day, whether they’re at their desks or on the go.
“I like to show my teams that Slack is a fun platform to collaborate because Slack has personality,” said Inocencio.
That personality continues to shape how teams work together, helping build stronger connections in a distributed environment.
“Slack gives you a glimpse into a company’s culture — how people communicate, collaborate, and express themselves, down to the emoji they use.”
What’s next
Bringing AI-powered context into Slack
Looking ahead, Coastal sees Slack evolving into a central interface for interacting with company systems and institutional knowledge.
To support this, the engineering team is developing an internal Slack bot called Teller, designed to surface similar incidents, identify who to involve, flag impacted systems and partners, and summarize key postmortems.
“The goal is to use Slack and AI to make those first 10 to 15 minutes of an incident more efficient,” said Abbott.
Over time, Coastal sees this approach extending beyond incident response. Teams could ask an AI assistant questions like “Where are we on campaign approvals?” and get an immediate answer without leaving their workflow.
This vision reflects a broader shift: Slack becoming the central place where teams access knowledge, coordinate work, and help partners bring new financial innovations to market faster.
