Multiplying Trading Potential with Innovative Data-Driven Platforms

Business challenge

As finance becomes closely integrated with technology, innovative investment banking unlocks vast opportunities by offering streamlined digital products and user experiences. One of our clients is Europe’s leading online financial and trading services provider, with over 400,000 customers. They can access 20+ global stock exchanges using their own performant and secure tools. With offices in the world’s top financial hubs, the bank offers best-in-class financial services and tailored investment options.

To address growing customer demand for trading and investment banking, our client planned to advance their product portfolio with new solutions to bring wealth management to the next level. A lack of engineering resources prompted them to look for a credible technology partner with relevant expertise. After analyzing feedback from industry players, our client chose Intellias to implement their extensive product roadmap. With broad experience in financial services consulting and development, we scaled our client’s engineering teams and delivered customized data-driven tools for secure investment banking and trading.

Solution delivered

Purpose-built features

One of the first products we built was a know your customer (KYC) module to verify a user’s identity and establish a secure business relationship. With the ongoing Brexit process, we had to account for changing banking regulations for British nationals. Integrated prospect verification allowed our client to speed up customer onboarding while meeting stringent risk assessment and anti-money laundering (AML) policies in Europe and other parts of the world.

Next, we implemented a full spectrum of online banking services using the latest FinTech innovations, including retail trading, Forex mortgages, savings accounts, crypto assets, and robo-advisory. The latter employed AI algorithms to detect trends and forecast price directions for customers. This helps them automate investment operations by relying on digital financial advisors, requiring little to no human involvement. These services composed an encompassing trading platform with exhaustive analysis and charting tools to streamline effective decision-making.

We successfully integrated our client’s CRM software into this new digital banking ecosystem. Setting up a resilient data infrastructure was crucial in upgrading their internal processes to establish enhanced customer management, document processing, and reporting operations.

Behavior-driven development

Intellias engineers leveraged the behavior-driven development approach during feature design, focused on aligning user experiences with business goals. This Agile technique assumed close interaction among all stakeholders, so we maintained a constant feedback loop with managers and end users to clarify product requirements. This helped us avoid feature bloat by delivering only necessary and usable functionality.

After conducting behavior-specific tests, we outlined executable scenarios to verify product quality. To relate business purposes to specific product features, we generated user stories that communicated expected behaviors to teams for implementation and testing. Effective use of continuous integration environments allowed us to deliver high-quality products on time and with maximum value for our client and their customers.

Cross-functional squads

We employed the Spotify model to enhance team agility and productivity by driving autonomy, communication, accountability, and quality. To do this, Intellias engineers formed four squads, each focused on one specific feature area and guided by a technical lead and a product owner. Having outlined our key values as working software, self-management, collective code ownership, transparency, and welcoming change, we shaped a trustful relationship with our client’s stakeholders.

Each product squad possessed cross-functional knowledge to autonomously fulfill assigned responsibilities when building a specific functional area:

• An onboarding module that incorporated due diligence and KYC checks during account creation to assess the risks of prospective customers
• A high-load trading platform with a broad range of Forex and cryptocurrency trading tools for our client’s customers to achieve their investment objectives simply and intuitively
• A customer profile module that integrated a corporate CRM system using an API to streamline back-office operations for customer data management and personal consultant assistance
• A robust online banking portal offering easy access to major markets, financial products, and communication channels between the bank and the customer, including chats, newsletters, and e-signatures

Apart from solid engineering expertise, all four squads proved their efficiency by organizing around work rather than formal routines. This flexibility allowed us to increase innovation and productivity and swiftly deliver top-notch features to our investment banking and trading client.

Business outcome

We assumed full responsibility for the project results within the defined scope and budget using the managed delivery model. In close coordination with our client’s product management and based on valuable customer input, we translated business expectations into explicit user stories for implementation. This approach allowed us to deliver value-added features transformed into tangible benefits for our client:

• Drawing on our FinTech expertise and technology advisory, our client avoided production bottlenecks in their intensive product pipeline.
• By enlarging our client’s engineering capacity, we provided the needed scalability and reduced time to market.
• Intellias Agile teams helped our client expand their product offering with the latest online financial and trading services.
• New internet banking, trading, and onboarding features increased our client’s revenue streams and customer loyalty.
• By leveraging Intellias managed services, our client reduced overhead, mitigated delivery risks, and optimized operations.

Our client has gained a position among the world’s leading digital banks, and we are keen to further develop our partnership, building innovative banking solutions.