How Flagstone modernized incident management with Microsoft Teams and incident.io

• 294 incidents managed in the first 3.5 months
• 4.7/5 internal satisfaction score
• 114% of contracted seats deployed organically
• Full PagerDuty migration in under two months

Flagstone operates the UK’s leading savings platform connecting individuals, businesses, and charities with savings products across more than 65 partner banks. As a regulated business, operational resilience isn't optional. Their remote first workforce of 350+ rely on a Microsoft tech stack to run their operations, including Azure infrastructure, Azure DevOps, Azure Monitor, as well as Teams as their primary method of collaboration and conversation.

When Senior Engineering Manager Dewi Rees arrived in mid-2025, he inherited a PagerDuty contract expiring in a few months and recognized immediately how incident.io could help eliminate some of the manual work the old system had created. Two months later, PagerDuty was gone, the whole organization was on incident.io, and risk and compliance were mandating the creation of all incidents through the platform.

Built for compliance... not the engineers responding

Flagstone's incident management wasn't broken, incidents got resolved, the lights stayed on, but the process behind it was fragmented and painful to work with. PagerDuty handled alerting and on-call paging, integrated with Azure Monitor, Pingdom, and App Insights. Azure DevOps tracked incidents through a work item form with close to 50 fields across multiple tabs, with mandatory fields, custom workflows, and triggers. There was no direct integration between the two. In order to simply raise an incident, their team needed to know which tool to use, how to fill in the form, and who to assign it to — significant overhead in a moment that already demands full attention.

Knowledge, scattered across two systems

Resolving and communicating about an incident happened in DevOps tickets comments or scattered across Teams channels with no dedicated location. When it came to post-incident learnings and postmortems, compliance had to sift through both the tickets and the Teams channels to create their reporting. Engineers also had to do detective work, there was no centralized place to review information for a post-mortem, let alone gather insights to learn from.

On-call hygiene also suffered from this fragmented system. PagerDuty had alerts that had gone unresolved for over a year. There was no measurement of MTTR or MTTA. New engineers were thrown in at the deep end.

The process had kept the lights on, but it was time to raise the bar.

One champion, two months, and a company-wide transformation

Dewi arrived at Flagstone already a convert. He'd evaluated incident.io at a previous company and knew what it could do. When he learned the platform was already in the stack, he volunteered on the spot to drive the rollout, despite it sitting outside his core responsibilities as an engineering manager.

Dewi had about two months until the PagerDuty contract expired. One additional challenge was that Flagstone operates with a decentralized model. Every squad owns its own incidents, which meant there was no single team to hand ownership to. Bringing the whole organization along was built into the challenge from the start.

"When I volunteered, especially with the timeline we had, I knew I was taking a bit of a risk, I wondered if I'd set myself up for failure."

Building for scale from day one

His approach was deliberate. He configured the platform himself, established the alerting pattern for one area, then created a template other teams could follow. He recruited champions across squads — one team lead set up an escalation path template the rest of the organization reused. The incident.io team ran training sessions, including a best practices session with a quiz and prizes that drove strong engagement.

Most critically, he partnered with risk and compliance from day one. The rollout wasn't positioned as an engineering initiative, they positioned it as an opportunity for operational excellence across our whole company.

The team ran business continuity tests on the platform early, getting CTO Lee Provoost and other senior leaders to experience the value firsthand. One magic moment for the risk team was seeing how a Teams call launched directly from an incident channel, joinable by anyone. For a team used to coordinating across departments and tools during major incidents, something as simple as centralizing communication felt like a real progress.

"I was the driver, but I couldn't have done it without bringing the team leads and senior leaders along. Their buy-in was everything."

Two months after he started, PagerDuty was gone. The migration was complete.

What incident response looks like now

Today Flagstone's entire incident operation now runs through incident.io on Microsoft Teams and includes more than a dozen squads, each owning their own services and on-call rotations, operating under the compliance requirements of a regulated financial services business.

For serious incidents, a bridging call launches directly from the incident channel. Risk and compliance, client services, and engineering coordinate in real time, from the same place. When the incident resolves, high and critical severity cases go through the postmortem process, now mandated by the risk and compliance team to run in incident.io rather than Azure DevOps.

Together, incident.io and Microsoft Teams give Flagstone the operational foundation a regulated financial services business needs.

Built for engineering. Embraced by the whole business.

In the first three and a half months, Flagstone managed 294 incidents through the platform. The internal satisfaction score sits at 4.7 out of 5. Responder deployment reached 114% of contracted seats as non-engineering teams joined the platform organically without mandates or much pushing from leadership.

On-call hygiene has improved dramatically. Where PagerDuty had alerts sitting unresolved for over a year, incident.io brought structure and accountability.

Adoption has spread throughout the organization because of incident.io’s ease of use. Risk and compliance, client services, legal, and operations are all on the platform. The risk and compliance team mandated that postmortems be completed in incident.io rather than Azure DevOps. Client services requested custom fields for tracking client impact. The entire organization was added to the incident Teams channel for visibility.

For new engineers, the change has been equally significant.

"With the old process, new engineers were thrown in at the deep end. With incident.io, it's become a part of how engineers work from day one."

A partnership, not just a contract

Flagstone entered the relationship clear-eyed about one risk: incident.io's support for the Microsoft ecosystem was still catching up. Flagstone was selected as a design partner for incident.io's Microsoft Teams and AI product investments, participating in regular sessions with the product team and providing detailed feedback on how Teams conversations differ from Slack.

In the months since, Dewi has seen that investment pay off. "I've seen a real step change in incident.io's focus on the Microsoft ecosystem," he says. "Every new feature is genuinely appreciated."

For Dewi, the migration validated the risk he took on his first day.

Resilience, as a foundation

As a regulated financial services company, Flagstone's operational resilience requirements are only going to intensify. incident.io is now positioned as a core part of how they meet them.

For Microsoft Teams organizations in regulated industries evaluating incident management platforms, Flagstone's experience offers a clear signal.