As the largest credit union in its state, our client needed to digitally transform their banking experience to better match their scale and suit the needs of their customers. Starting with a 100% on-prem data center, a website that wasn’t user friendly or intuitive, and no mobile app was a challenge. They needed the right partner to support the small team that was spearheading this initiative with multiple moving parts. And they needed someone with deep engineering skills to ensure that everything was executed flawlessly.
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One of the biggest challenges facing organizations that want to implement a digital product or solution is change management. Especially in highly regulated industries, creating a process for change is critical. A digital product should not only make the customer experience better, but also enhance the employee experience. With our credit union client, the challenge was to implement digital solutions and work very closely with their teams to educate them on best practices, how to launch their digital offerings, and even modernize development governance and processes for optimal efficiency.
While there were technical solutions that could serve as the levers to move the credit union forward, the real transformation happened when our client embraced a new way of thinking about banking as a result of our work together. Let’s take a closer look at how we implemented digital banking solutions for this credit union client.
There were three components of this digital banking solution that Mobiquity helped the credit union launch:
Monolith to microservices
Our client was hosting everything on their own servers, which caused some issues in their backend architecture. They were inexperienced with microservices and therefore were leveraging a monolith model where all of their applications were created, maintained, and deployed as a single unit. However, this architecture caused issues such as high maintenance costs, poor scaling ability, and no clear separation of logical components to decipher the apps and any potential problems that could arise. Mobiquity educated the client on what a microservices architecture is and how, by breaking down the monolith into independent services, they can be maintained and scaled separately so that the business can execute on independent business goals within each microservice.
Mobile app
In order to create a functional, on-brand mobile application, our team worked with the credit union to identify the top features that their new mobile app would need to be useful and meaningful for their customers. We implemented biometrics to make login easier, created remote mobile deposit capture, fraud detection, and even integrated messaging to make the digital customer experience seamless. We also supported the credit union through the product release process, ensuring that their app passed all of the necessary requirements to be accepted by the App Stores and that the app was secure given the sensitive nature of the customer data being stored within it.
Website enhancements
When launching a new digital product such as a mobile app, other digital properties must be considered. Specifically, it’s important that the design and user experience are consistent across all digital mediums to avoid confusing the customer and ultimately risking their loyalty to the credit union. Mobiquity was instrumental in ensuring that the website was similar in style and functionality to the mobile app we created. In addition, we improved the functionality of the website to ensure it was user friendly.
Integrated technical solution
The credit union’s existing on-premise datacenter established new physical and virtualized hosting, built to support new traffic from their membership at scale. Close orchestration between the application development, server administration, and datacenter operations teams, supported by Mobiquity’s guidance, allowed for purpose-built infrastructure to support the project.
Mobiquity introduced comprehensive software development kits (SDKs) and model backend and mobile applications to accelerate the planning and delivery of the mobile applications. These SDKs are based on Java with Spring Boot for the server applications, Objective-C and Swift for the iOS application, and Java and Kotlin for the Android application.
The credit union’s existing API management team, working between legacy systems and the new backend microservices, developed a dedicated integration layer for the project.
Operational technology was also required in addition to the project’s backbone infrastructure and code. To that end, self-hosted Atlassian services such as Confluence, Bitbucket, and Jira allow for improved organization and management of the project workflows, code, and long-term information. Meanwhile, Jenkins, security scanning, and Nexus servers enable the project to adopt industry-standard practices in continuous integration, static and dynamic analysis, artifact storage, control over third-party resources, and continuous delivery.
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