How we co-created a winning SaaS platform for banks

Traditional banks struggle to offer services related to digital assets like cryptocurrencies, because they don’t meet the regulatory needs of traditional financial systems. Our client changes that – offering a SaaS platform that allows banks to offer digital asset services and maintain their regulatory compliance. In technical speak, our client has created a payment and value transfer rail that runs parallel to a bank’s core technology.

The challenge: Optimizing the platform for sustainable success

The client approached us as the software partner to prepare the platform for launch. Their conditions: it must be intuitive, customer-oriented, and easy to maintain and upgrade. 

Above all, the platform also needed to be easy for banks to use from day one: a turn-key SaaS solution to enable banks to provide crypto and digital asset services in a regulatory-compliant manner. To support all of that, the platform needed to enable integrations with banks for crypto payments.

The team: All bases, covered

We assembled a team of twenty strong, covering all areas from software development to project management. 

• three front-end developers 
• three software developers for the Business Rule Engine
• six software developers for integrations 
• four QA engineers 
• one QA lead 
• one DevOps
• one system architect
• one product owner/project manager
  
  

High-quality code and adaptable architecture

Our partnership with our client allowed us to create a product with architecture that adapted to various integrations, including core banking systems, digital asset custodian, and digital asset trading. The high-quality code we delivered helped define MVP solutions.

Here’s what we did to get those results: 

Fixed functionalities and improvement implementation 

We began by identifying illogicalities, roadblocks, and areas for improvement. From there, we started fixing existing functionalities and building new ones, including custody, staking, conversion, and real time payment services. The aim: create an understandable and easy-to-navigate platform to enable end-users to perform transactions (deposit, withdraw, send, request, escrow, exchange, stake, etc.) with various digital assets.

System integrations

We created an architecture design for integrations for core bank systems, digital assets custody, and a database for storing users, transactions, etc.

The platform provides a range of functionalities, and here are some of them:

• selling/buying crypto
• exchange (crypto, fiat)
• sending/gifting crypto
• requesting crypto request
• staking
• deposit – crypto transfer to the client’s platform

Business Rules Engine 

In parallel with the front- and back-end development and improvement, we started working on defining and building the Business Rules Engine – an application that enables precise decision-making, combining onboarding rules, anti-money laundering rules, bank rules, MSB Rules, and the client’s rules. It’s a lot of rules.

Quality assurance

Right from the start, we initiated quality assurance testing, focusing on end-to-end testing, boundary value analysis, and equivalence partitioning testing. We quickly achieved our primary goal of verifying the product’s integrity.

A look at the technologies we used:

• Services – heavy use of Amazon AWS Cloud services like ec2, S3, Elastic beanstalk, ECS, Cognito IAM and others
• Front-end side – React 
• Back-end side – Node.js 
• Business Rule Engine – Java Spring Boot 
• State management – Redux-Saga 
• Database solutions – SQL, NoSQL, MS SQL and MongoDB