Challenge
The first and foremost challenge of the project was to integrate 12 systems into one seamless business process. The list included both Bank’s internal and external systems, and third party providers’ systems. The next one is time pressure – identification and selection of major features required to deliver the MVP phase in just a few months were other demanding activities.
Benefits
- Median TTY decreased
- Median TTC decreased
- Improved user experience (UX) for both customers and branch officers – modern document templates were designed and ergonomic UI gave the user an opportunity to pick up the application at the same place where it was left.
- Risk rules – one engine with rules which produce an automated decision instead of hardcoded rules in the old application.
- Creating Product catalogue with basic product features – managed by product manager
- Employee satisfaction increased during a lending process.
Solution
A Lending project kick-off was combined together with a hackathon, on which discovery workshops took place. Experts from both Raiffeisen Bank Croatia and Bluesoft had to rise to the occasion with a view to understanding core requirements and selectively choosing key features designed to fit into enterprise architecture.
A project was driven in a scrum methodology and bluesoft provided a comprehensive development team with a great deal of accountability for a product shape on Croatian side.
3 microservices delivered on StarBoost platform integrated with over a dozen of external systems through REST, SOAP and Kafka produce microfrontends, which give users, such as branch officers, risk managers, product managers and higher authorities to mention a few, an impression that there is only one application, no matter which role is assigned to the user.
Since data model was shaped throughout the project, the team decided to apply a hybrid approach for a persistence layer. A combination of relational model and JSON type columns in PostgreSQL gave the opportunity take the best from both: expected data readability and, boost of the development speed and reduced the solution complexity.
The first version of lending process included product catalogue, rules engine, basic parametrization, interfaces and documents generation. All of this was developed using open-source stack.
Technologies
- Java (Spring)
- JS
- Drools
- Camunda
- Kafka
- PostgreSQL
- Selenium
Result
After six months of work Lending team managed to deliver MVP version on business expectations. Contemporary look and feel of the application with multiple process steps were successfully deployed to the production environment which constitutes the process for first loan product. What is more, the application was seamlessly integrated into currently used front-office and back-office applications (hosted on StarBoost platform) and internationalization feature – Croatian and English languages were supported. Furthermore, special care was dedicated to user ergonomics with the same UI pattern for all StarBoost applications. This kind of application is a great base for the future omnichannel solution, which may directly influence customer experience of lending processes or maybe even may change the way how people can get a loan through new, digital channels!