Strategic Consulting for Fast and Risk-Free Mobile Banking App Modernization
Customer
The Customer is a European bank founded in 1994.
Challenge
To keep the competitive edge, the Customer planned to upgrade its outdated mobile banking app. A new version was supposed to have a modernized UI and expanded functionality. The Customer was looking for an IT consultancy with banking expertise to provide feasibility analysis of their draft vision of the app’s refresh and bring in additional ideas for the app functionality improvement. They also required the analysis of the readiness of the app back end and middleware to support planned modernization.
Solution
The Customer hired ScienceSoft as an IT consultancy due to our 16-year experience in the banking industry and rich experience with projects on mobile banking apps. After studying the Customer’s needs and eliciting project requirements, ScienceSoft’s team of 4 consultants split the project into core parts – business analysis and a technical audit. The team worked on them in parallel to ensure the Customer can start app modernization as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Business analysis
Two ScienceSoft’s business analysts explored the current mobile banking app to uncover gaps in its functionality and drawbacks in UI hindering smooth user experience. They also sifted through the Customer’s ideas on new app functionality drawn from user feedback and turned viable ones into concise user flows. The BAs further provided recommendations on what features can be implemented to align with today’s user demands for mobile banking apps.
The cooperation for this project part consisted of a series of several-hour sessions with the project stakeholders. The current app functionality was broken down into logical blocks to discuss each one closely in separate sessions. After discussion of each block was completed, the BAs created storyboards describing user flows for new features and further adjusted them based on the Customer’s feedback.
Technical audit
ScienceSoft’s Java consultant and a mobile development consultant analyzed the back end and middleware of the Customer’s banking app to understand how well they could support new functionality and an increased load when more bank clients would use it. They evaluated code quality, checked the app’s architecture and integration layer for issues that could influence the performance of the modernized app, and described needed changes in a detailed report.
Results
The project lasted 2.5 months of active collaboration between ScienceSoft’s team and key project stakeholders on the Customer’s side. The Customer received a software specification with functional and non-functional requirements for an upgraded mobile banking app. Also, the Customer obtained a technical audit of their app’s back end and middleware with a roadmap on their modernization to enable the mobile banking app to withhold a growing user base smoothly.
Technologies and Tools
Q&A sessions, brainstorming, functional decomposition, business requirements analysis, competitor analysis, code review, software architecture audit.
