Global Financial Institution Reimagines How Software Development Is Done—And Saves $2M

Challenge

Modernize, decentralize, simplify

As the first bank to launch an online trading platform in Europe—over 25 years ago—this institution is no stranger to building pioneering customer-facing products.

To better support its clients, the bank launched a set of APIs that developers from the group, its partners, and B2B2C customers can use to extend the trading platform into their apps and systems. However, after years of evolving its technology stack, the back-office system racked up crushing technical debt, which couldn’t keep pace with the rapid development of the API set. In order to keep this important solution delivering value for its network, the bank needed to modernize it—and quickly.

But that wasn’t all the company had in mind. It also wanted to give more freedom to each functional subdomain by letting them build and maintain their business products autonomously through a federated development model across functions. More autonomy for different functions made those groups happy—while also reducing the burden on the central IT team.

Solution

Low-code Center of Excellence for extreme reusability

The bank’s global technology center, located in India, led as the change agent for the bank and adopted OutSystems to implement a Center of Excellence (CoE) for the development of mission critical apps at an enterprise scale. OutSystems’ no vendor lock-in, full stack capabilities, embedded AI capabilities for both app development and lifecycle management, embedded DevSecOps features, and ready to use templates and accelerators made it the right choice for the investment bank.

The company’s first priority was to transform back-office operations to empower front line staff with intuitive user experience so they could serve the end-customers better.

This front-end modernization strategy with OutSystems included:

• Client and partner-facing apps: Build customized frontends on top of the institution’s Platform Framework backed by its API set.
• Employee-facing apps: Modernize the UI of internal apps front-ends consuming microservices via its API set.
• Departmental use cases: Decentralize frontend app development by providing reusable components and templates and allow subdomains/individual business units to autonomously build the apps they need to effectively run their departments while following organizational standards.

To scale its digitization efforts across the entire company, the team established a low-code CoE with the support of OutSystems Professional Services, including a Technical Success Manager, and partner Happiest Minds.

The CoE created the foundation for using OutSystems across the bank and enabled a reusability strategy. This means that internal and external developers can use reusable components, templates, and accelerators to build the applications they need while following central IT guidelines.

In just one year, the company launched ten new applications on top of its backend system, completely transforming the way it runs its operations. One of the solutions built, an operations management app, brings the group’s operations into a single place: Corporate Actions, Securities Transfer, Settlements, Regulatory Reporting, Tax Saving Products, Payment Operations, Pricing & Account Configurations, Post trade Processing, Client Management, and Financial Liquidity Management. It includes more than 200 front-ends and integrates with the company’s backend system via its key set of APIs.

Results

2+ Million dollars saved in app development costs

Thanks to OutSystems’ reusable components, automation, and one-click deployment, the institution estimates that it'll save approximately two million US dollars in app development in three years.

The adoption of a platform approach and this new agile IT architecture has enabled the company to speed up app development by three times, compared to the processes it had before. Simple to complex applications that would take 5 to 15 days to develop are now being delivered in 1 to 5 days across front and back offices.

In addition to significantly cutting developers’ workload, OutSystems reduced the time of other technical and nontechnical staff involved in development projects. The company has realized about 25% optimization in resource requirements for development and maintenance of enterprise applications.