Front-office System Modernisation for Erste Group Bank AG
Fine-tuned delivery process
Savings on maintenance costs
Technical debt reduction
Project Brief
Modernise a 15-year-old front-office system to increase business value, optimise the user experience, and reduce error rates and maintenance costs.
Working with Profinit proved that the expert application of software engineering principles can enhance any application.
Tomáš Foltýn
Cluster IT Lead (Housing, Unsecured financing, Branch applications)
Challenge
Česká spořitelna, the Czech arm of Erste Group Bank AG, had been using its front-office system for more than 15 years. Although initially developed internally, the system was subsequently assigned for maintenance to an external vendor. That resulted in a lack of governance and know-how over the system on the side of the client in long term.
This period saw the system undergo minimal modernisation, resulting in the following negative impacts:
- Overly complex and ineffective change requests due to poor communication and lack of clarity on delegation of responsibilities.
- Significant accrual of technical debt arising from poor support and lack of digital development over many years.
- High error rate due to long-term neglect of basic software engineering principles
Frustrated by the ongoing lack of agile transformation, the bank decided to reclaim the system and seek a new partner to perform a complete modernisation.
Business Needs
The solution needed to meet the following targets:
- Deliver added business value
- Bridge the tech gap from legacy to modern
- Improve automation and overall quality
- Reduce technical debt
Solution
Building on its long-term partnership with Profinit going back many years, Česká spořitelna commissioned our team of engineers to apply an agile solution aimed at modernising its front-office legacy system.
Profinit consulted with the client on the development and maintenance of its front-end as well as back-end modules. As part of a proposed software development lifecycle, our engineers conducted an in-depth system assessment, which involved defining key processes and integrating CI/CD practices.
Given the complexity and scale of the operation, responsibilities for stabilising the system had to be divided between different teams. At peak, more than 20 of our consultants were working on the project in various capacities.
Our solution architecture was based on a UI redesign of the legacy platform. In a reasonably short time, we oversaw the smooth transition from obsolete to fit-for-purpose, with the system capable of supporting additional features.
Tech Stack
.Net CORE
Kafka
Angular
OpenShift
DevOps
Project Summary
We successfully oversaw a complete front-office system modernisation based on greenfield development principles, delivering a new architecture and removing dependencies on existing legacy code.
- Delivery of a modernised front-office system
- Technical debt reduced significantly
- Rollout of new features and safer implementation
- Increased functionality and decreased error rate
- Scalable, well-documented and maintained
- New architecture enabling future integration with other systems
- The client reclaimed governance and know-how over the new system