CASE STUDY

Banking and finance

Leading the digital transformation of banking services delivered through mobile applications.

Mobile
ReactNative
Redux
iOS
Android
INTRODUCTION

Traditional banks are facing a paradigm shift. New players are appearing in the market, providing end-to-end, easy to use services to their customers, especially exploiting the potential of mobile technologies. More and more clients expect banking services to be delivered smoothly, on the go, at high speed and on demand. WellD supports banks in this transition, by designing, developing and managing the lifecycle of modern mobile banking applications.

CHALLENGE

To keep the pace, one of our customers designed a strategic roadmap to provide its clients with advanced banking services at the palm of their hands. One of the main challenges was the provision of multiple mobile apps to different markets, all sharing some core functionalities while still differentiating in terms of interface and user experience. They partnered with WellD to engineer and develop a hybrid agile solution to deliver all their applications, and to setup and run an automatic devops pipeline.

We faced both architectural and infrastructural challenges, driven by critical requirements:

  1. The apps should share a core common base of features
  2. The apps should allow for high scalability in terms of continuous features delivery
  3. The apps should be compliant with evolving security and authorization standards and identity recognition techniques
  4. The apps should be released in multiple versions to multiple quality assurance stages
  5. The release pipelining of the apps should allow for stringent delivery frequency

Mobile technology is taking over the leadership of banking services

SOLUTION

We chose to implement the applications with React Native, a mobile application framework leveraging ReactJS on top of a native app, and this choice proved to be advantageous in multiple aspects.

Implementing the view layer in pure JS allowed us to establish a common design system across both mobile platforms and achieve a consistent look and feel with relative ease; developing complex UI components was undoubtedly more intuitive right off the bat, as we could rely on our well-established internal knowledge of ReactJS.

We made the most of the flexibility provided by JavaScript's dynamic runtime and module system to build a platform-agnostic whitelabel engine which,  given the application codebase and a set of configurations (theme, feature toogles, endpoints, ...), generates customised variants of the application aimed at different markets.

On the other hand, being able to easily reach for the native APIs allowed us to implement device integrations (e.g. biometric authentication) and meet the strict security requirements that banking apps must satisfy.

Scaling collaboration and delivery

As the number of customisations and features of the apps increases, we need to make sure to deliver new versions of the apps with the smallest amount of effort. This is crucial to guarantee that the development team can stay focused on the code while the stakeholders (i.e. QA team, business) tried the new features and give feedback in a streamlined manner.

To this end, we implemented a sophisticated CI/CD pipeline with GitLab CI and Fastlane that tests, generates and builds all the variants of the app for multiple environments: the QA team can immediately test all newly integrated features by downloading the app through Firebase App Tester;  business can access more stable builds with a more careful release schedule through Play Store Beta and Testflight.

OUTCOMES
1 ⟶ N

A single team is able to develop multiple mobile applications with a unified tech stack across different mobile operating systems

20+ daily builds

The CI/CD pipeline system guarantees more than 20 daily builds, ensuring a rapid feedback loop between professionals of different departments

MENU
CLOSE
HomeWhat we doHow we workJoin usTech blog
info@welld.chView all our contacts