Banking portal development for a large EU bank
Itransition delivered a new version of the internet banking app with an improved UI/UX and a broader set of digital banking services.
Challenge
Customer
With over €1.6 billion in assets, Rietumu Banka is one of the largest private banks in the Baltic region. The bank specializes in corporate and premium banking services and has clients all over Europe. Operating for over 20 years, the bank covers both business and individual banking segments, while offering a wide range of savings and capital growth programs.
Objective
The customer owned an internet banking portal that started to lose its popularity due to a number of functional and UI issues. The system had an outdated look and feel, while the implementation of any necessary updates was disrupting the system’s stability in addition to being time-consuming.
The customer turned to Itransition for banking portal development. Relying on their experience in web portal development, our team set out to create a new version of the internet banking portal with a modern user interface, covering a broader range of user scenarios. It was necessary to make the portal stable, testable, easily manageable and customizable, so that the bank’s internal development team could add new features and remove outdated ones, as well as reuse existing UI elements and services.
Solution
Before our team could start banking portal development, Itransition’s business analysts got to evaluating the existing solution and defining the missing features.
In order to improve the app’s user interface and shorten the customer journey, Itransition’s business analysts also researched into possible internet banking personas and their needs, in order to rework the portal’s business logic.
Following a detailed specification, our development team delivered a new version of the internet banking application that allowed the bank’s clients to:
- Access the information about their debit and credit cards, accounts, savings, and loans
- Manage payments, money transfers, and credit payments
- Purchase and sell assets
- Create investment portfolios
- Manage deposits and funds
- Communicate with the bank’s representatives
- Get the bank’s latest news and offers
Module architecture and code reusability
Itransition’s banking portal development team created a modular architecture that made it possible for the bank’s internal developers to replace or add any functionality without affecting the rest of the system and its performance, all without any external help required. We followed a component-centric approach to UI development, which allowed the bank’s in-house specialists to reuse UI elements and services when updating the user interface when needed.
API development
Itransition’s team also actively participated in the server-side API development. We consulted the bank’s team on how to structure and unify APIs to make interfaces simpler and get an uncluttered and easily maintained application as a result.
Data security
As this internet banking portal was to process financial and personal data, our team paid great attention to the solution’s security, particularly to sensitive data protection. To enable role-based access, we implemented identity and access management features. We utilized protected connection gateways to prevent data leaks and guarantee the system blocked public access to confidential data.
Development process
Throughout the project, we utilized the Agile methodology with two-week sprints, daily meetings and discussions with the customer. To ensure a stable, predictable and repeatable delivery process, we set up and followed continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) practices with continuous code review and quality assurance.
Technologies
We used the AngularJS framework as the core frontend technology that helped us address UX challenges, implement reusable UI components, and ensure the solution’s recurring testing, including unit tests, integration, and infrastructure tests.
The Java-based backend hosts client web services that form the app’s business logic. The internet banking application was integrated with the client web services and internal banking systems via Gate API (JSON REST API).
Testing
As there was no internal regression testing practice in place, Itransition’s development team introduced automated testing that spanned end-to-end (E2E) testing, regression testing, and unit testing. Regular E2E and UI regression tests were to help the tech team promptly detect and fix any issues before they could affect the user experience.
To develop and launch automated tests, we utilized Java, Kotlin and TypeScript programming languages, as well as the JUnit framework for unit tests, Selenide for E2E tests, and Gemini as a utility that automated visual regression testing of the web pages.
Results
Itransition’s team has created a new version of a tailor-made portal for Rietumu Banka and thousands of its international clients. Through reworking their existing solution, we helped the bank align their digital strategy with their clients’ expectations, making their core banking app more intuitive, attractive, and speedy.
Itransition keeps cooperating with Rietumu Banka to this day. Our team provides continuous support of the solution, addresses any new challenges coming up in the course of the banking portal development, and consults the bank on optimal updates of the portal’s design and functionality.
