Fast and Cost-Effective Marketplace Development for a Bank with 100+ Branches

About Our Client

The Client is a large banking services provider in Central Asia with a countrywide network of 100+ branches. For more than 20 years, the company has been providing a full range of banking services to individuals and businesses.

Challenge

The Client stepped into the retail sector by offering a multi-vendor marketplace – an online environment where consumers could view a variety of products from about 14 major categories, compare prices from different sellers, and make purchases. Initially, the marketplace was implemented with the company’s in-house resources, which, at some point, were no longer sufficient due to the lack of required IT competencies.

The Client needed to seek external assistance and augment their team with extra skills in order to keep the project moving forward. As the project was supposed to evolve in an agile manner, the company was looking for a partner with a vast talent pool. In particular, they required skills in front- and back-end development, microservices-based development, and mobile development.

Solution

A provider of IT services and staff augmentation, ScienceSoft offered the Client a viable staffing solution to seamlessly fill the resource gap. Having joined the project in March 2020, ScienceSoft’s team has so far (August 2020) been engaged in the following jobs:

Angular web development and native mobile development on iOS and Android to speed up the front-end development efficiency. ScienceSoft’s developers worked on making the user interface evolve dynamically, elevating user experience with each iteration.

Back-end development on Golang. The Client opted for Golang for easy and quick deployability and cross-platform support. ScienceSoft’s developers were tasked to recode the legacy parts of the application that stalled its progress, in particular, outdated and hard-to-maintain payment systems. The team also integrated the application with different shipping carriers.

Gradual rearchitecting of a monolithic application into microservices to isolate software functionality into separate modules that were much easier to scale. Applying changes and updates at the level of independent services allowed for the uninterrupted operation of the whole application.

ScienceSoft’s experts leveraged the experience of working in international teams and prioritized fitting into the Client’s business processes and corporate culture. The communication remained consistent and mutually supportive throughout the cooperation.

Results

The cooperation between the Client and ScienceSoft has been productive so far and has continued to date (August 2020). While the company’s IT needs vary as the project evolves, the team augmentation provided by ScienceSoft allows for keeping a fast development pace and saving costs on hiring in-house developers. Augmenting their team with required IT talents, the Client has managed to establish a truly agile environment and evolve the marketplace application quickly.

Technologies and Tools

Golang, Go-Kit, Kubernetes, SQL /ORM, Microservices, Java, TypeScript, JavaScript, Angular 10, iOS Swift, Android Kotlin