Daring to dream bigger
It takes equal parts strategy, design and engineering to make a true impact in a business. And when it comes to the financial services industry, finding ways to grow and diversify while setting trends is a benchmark for continued success. Our client, an international bank and one of the biggest credit card providers in the co-branded credit card business, had a mission to achieve these milestones and more.
The vision? Increase the number of credit cardholders who already had a relationship with the bank, increase the number of card partnerships and venture into consumer lending — a brand new business line. But an outdated, unreliable technology platform depending on archaic processes held them back. Another primary concern was the potential loss of newly acquired customers due to downtime during an attempted fix. As a result, the bank needed an ambitious digital transformation partner with a background in agile software development to help them reach new heights.
A bespoke approach to true transformation
The bank partnered with Thoughtworks to bring their platform from a monolithic to a microservices-based architecture. We started the process by evaluating the current business to see if its existing platform could help build the new consumer lending line. We also assessed their codebases and services stack of front-end data integrations to determine the possibility of improving the credit card business.
Ultimately, we mutually chose to build the new consumer loan business from scratch while simultaneously stabilizing the existing platform. This way, critical pieces of the new consumer loan business could integrate into the current credit card business for refinement. Throughout the process, we also led our client into consumer-facing cloud technologies for the first time. As a result, the newly developed consumer lending line quickly gained traction, giving our client the confidence needed to scale as it increased business volume by 5x.
Thoughtworks (was) instrumental in the creation of our new platform. They openly shared their best-in-class thinking and logic, as well as their execution approach to ensure we drove towards the right goals with the right methodology.
Value added across the board
With a new, high-performing enterprise platform in place, the bank quickly found monumental success. The new consumer lending line grew to become an $800M business in just 24 months without experiencing any downtime thanks to the parallel approach. In addition, the bank saw a 50% savings through the reduction of business and operational staff required to process rewards and payments.
Over 12M customers redeemed rewards and benefits in real-time versus the former quarterly batch style, leading to a significantly improved customer experience. Software delivered once every quarter, now went live on-demand through automated deployments happening several times a day. Finally, the platform went on to support over 25M real-time credit card transactions per day.
