Summary
One of England’s oldest private banks, providing loans, mortgages and savings accounts to high-net-worth individuals, chose to engage with us on their digital transformation journey. A journey that required API modernisation and integration between in-house databases and third-party services. Providing its customers with a digital experience they would expect from a high street bank was of paramount importance for this project.
The Problem
The bank has a rich history and high standards but the digital experience provided for its customers was extremely limited. In the wake of innovation from the retail and commercial banking industry, there was increasing pressure for wealth managers to improve the technology strategies of the company or face losing
business to online wealth managers (robo-advisors). The company needed to avoid alienating traditional, long-standing customers while also providing a modern
solution for the next generation, who have grown up with high expectations of a positive digital experience. The outgoing systems integrator (SI) had left the programme in a fragile state. The APIs developed were not coherent, there was no rigour in the development process, and the code base was nearly impossible to reason with. To compound this, there were no unit or integration tests.
The Solution
Pursuing an API-led connectivity approach, QuadCorps used Mule 3 to integrate with third-party behavioural biometric and customer identification APIs and front-end APIs, while providing proprietary integration with the in-house database. A rigorous and robust continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline was established, using behaviour-driven development (BDD), Liquidbase, peer reviews (Gerrit), Jenkins and smoke testing to establish confidence in a fast-moving environment.
Outcomes
Customers were able to engage with the bank via mobile and online digital channels to make payments, view transactions, manage their holdings and beneficiaries, and action approvals. By leveraging API-led connectivity, the bank was able to reduce the lead time to market for new APIs, by reusing existing services and having a predictable pipeline for generating new solutions. By providing reusable APIs and a clear, coherent pipeline, the bank was able to confidently plan its ongoing digital
strategy.
