Agile Development and DevOps Integration for Financial Services Company

Highlights

The App Serving 35 Million Users Enhanced: The product received effective support and expansion into new countries, ensuring uninterrupted operations and continued growth.
Streamlined Deployment Process: By implementing several integrations and refining pipeline settings, the deployment process was significantly amplified, resulting in improved efficiency and reliability.
Optimized Testing Methodologies: Through the reworking of testing approaches and a shift towards automated testing, the quality and effectiveness of testing procedures were greatly improved, leading to enhanced product stability and faster release cycles.

Client

Our client is a leading UAE fintech company that offers expedited and easily accessible credit solutions in emerging and underserved markets. With a substantial monthly user base exceeding 35 million across more than 20 countries and a track record of facilitating over $1.6 billion in loans in the previous year, the company plays a pivotal role in empowering its partners to expand their reach to diverse populations in multiple geographic regions.

Country

United Arab Emirates

Industry

Fintech

Team Size:

Product

The business solution offers B2B digital lending services tailored for emerging markets through collaborations with banks, mobile network operators (MNOs), utility companies, and eCommerce platforms. The product encompasses a wide array of credit options such as airtime credit, embedded finance, nano loans, and device financing, catering to users across diverse countries.

Goals and objectives

The client engaged our services to promptly fill crucial positions with top-tier specialists to meet urgent project requirements. The project needed:

Development of New Functionality: Design new credit solutions tailored for local markets.
DevOps & Testing Enhancements: Transition from outdated CI/CD and testing methodologies.
Positioning to New and Existing Markets: Deploy products across diverse countries for both new and established markets.

Project challenge

Development Processes Setup: The company was transitioning from the Waterfall methodology to Agile approach, which required extra effort to define clear project objectives, manage priorities, and adapt to changing requirements.
Lack of Relevant Documentation: The team lacked a full understanding of the scope of work, dependencies, and priorities, resulting in additional effort for planning, executing, and tracking project tasks.
Communication Delays with the Customer’s Team: Inefficient communication channels resulted in prolonged response times from team members within the client’s organization.

Solution

Throughout the project, our involvement spanned across multiple critical stages.

During the development phase, our responsibilities included a spectrum of tasks ranging from providing support, refactoring, and crafting new logic to designing and implementing tailored solutions for various local markets. Notably, we led the development of menu and reconciliation services to cater to specific market requirements.

The DevOps and testing stage required us to orchestrate a comprehensive overhaul encompassing CI/CD pipeline establishment. Leveraging a suite of tools including Jenkins, Jira, Bitbucket, Slack, AIO, Sonarqube, Selenium/Chrome, JMeter, and InfluxDB, we performed seamless integration for enhanced efficiency.

Moreover, we revolutionized testing methodologies, with a pronounced emphasis on automated testing. To meet customer expectations and project timelines, we devised a proof of concept (POC) for UI, API, and performance testing. Simultaneously, we realigned the development process to seamlessly integrate with the new CI/CD and testing paradigms.

Additionally, we introduced a new Test Case management system tailored to the customer’s needs and budget, leading to substantial improvements in documentation and heightened transparency in the testing process.

Our team also played a pivotal role in constructing a monitoring solution tailored for critical business events, ensuring meticulous tracking of successful vs. failed customer transactions, identifying common errors, and monitoring custom metrics specific to project features.

To facilitate a smooth transition from development to production environment, during the deployment phase we conducted:

Integration of CI/CD;
Integration with Nexus;
Integration of Hashicorp Vault;
Integration of Ansible playbook.

Tech Stack

Java
Spring
Apache Kafka
Zabbix
PostgreSQL
Jenkins
Hashicorp Vault
Ansible Playbook
SonarQube
Docker Compose
Kubernetes

Our results

Through strategic collaboration with our team, the financial company successfully enhanced its operational efficiency and product reliability. By addressing key challenges and implementing tailored solutions, our client positioned itself for continued growth and success.

Product Support: We successfully provided comprehensive product support in existing and new markets, ensuring smooth operations and continued growth.
Deployment Process Enhancement: Through the implementation of multiple integrations and refinement of pipeline settings, we streamlined the deployment process, leading to improved efficiency and reliability.
Testing Optimization: By reworking testing approaches and prioritizing automated testing, we enhanced the quality and effectiveness of testing procedures, resulting in improved product stability and faster release cycles.