App-based banks are the digital disruptors of the banking industry. Their competitive edge, however, relies upon the constant modernization of their software development infrastructure.
As the UK’s first app-only bank, Atom Bank has set the standard for disruption by consistently outperforming the industry in customer service and employee engagement.
When it came to improving their efficiency, the benefits of Atom Bank making the best use of their Google Cloud service couldn’t be overlooked. Especially as they aimed for an ambitious Cost Efficiency Ratio much below the 2022 industry average of around 52% as per Mckinsey’s Global Banking Annual Review of 2023.
From manual care to automated scale
Before the project, Atom Bank’s non-production (development and test) environments were not taking full advantage of being cloud based. Building an entire new environment took over a week. This slow setup meant that each environment was treated like a "pet": it had a unique name, was nurtured carefully, and needed special attention whenever something went wrong.
The problem with this approach is that, much like a pet, when issues arose with the environment, it required time-consuming care to fix. The ideal approach is to treat environments more like "cattle": important and well-maintained, but easily replaceable. If one environment encounters a problem, it should be quickly discarded and replaced with a new, functioning environment rather than spending time trying to repair it.
However, Atom’s Infrastructure-as-Code approach was incomplete, and some deployments still required manual work. This made it difficult to scale up efficiently, slowed down development cycles, and introduced inefficiencies.
The path from development to production was not always deterministic as environments had an inconsistent state. Tests could fail during integration and pre-production stages due to incorrect configuration and invalid test data. Software releases required the judgment of experienced engineers in the bank’s Change Advisory Board (CAB) as the tests were sometimes inconclusive and unreliable. For an app-only bank aiming for daily improvement cycles, this was unworkable.
We are always looking to improve our products and give our customers the best user experience. This means we need to be able to quickly, safely and continuously push new updates to market.
Accelerating cloud migration with Google
Thoughtworks and Atom Bank identified Google’s Enterprise Foundations Blueprint as the right cloud service to modernize their infrastructure. However, the bank’s complex requirements exceeded Google’s typical support channels.
As an existing Google Premier Partner, we connected with Atom Bank’s Google Account manager and expedited Atom Bank’s requests. Google reduced the wait times and gave Atom Bank early access to features, like Kubernetes Master Nodes using private domain name server endpoints. Google also provided tailored support in security and engineering, including direct involvement from Google engineers who worked collaboratively on the project.
Leveraging our established relationship with Google, Thoughtworks secured an increase in our project quota from 15 to 200 within mere hours, providing the crucial support we needed to move forward swiftly.
Transforming the workspace with Environments as a Service
We began by tailoring Environments as a Service to provide “on-demand” access to test environments. This enables teams to create new test environments as required, rather than having to wait for access to the centralized existing environments.
We are also simplifying the migration of individual microservices to new environments, reducing deployment and test wait times. Google’s Private Service Connect eliminates the governance and engineering complexity of communicating with dependencies in existing environments. Through Google Cloud, teams use continuous integration and continuous deployment (CICD) to build and deploy consistently. As a result, the time taken from development to production is significantly reduced.
Significant time savings are made by eliminating tasks like:
Requesting new permissions from the security team to perform updates and upgrades
Asking for security tokens to enable secret decryption when deploying in production
Raising support tickets to switch between non-production and production VPN access
Relying on daily CAB meetings to deploy to production
In addition to these time savings, the improved efficiencies of Google’s Enterprise Blueprint environments will help Atom Bank towards their goal of a net-positive carbon impact. Where teams need to test with different configurations or test data, only the software affected needs to run instead of requiring a separate full bank environment.
Creating value beyond speed to production
With these new efficient systems supported by Google, the development team has the capacity to be more productive and see their visions come to life – rather than get stopped mid-way through the production cycle or held up due to infrastructure issues. Work satisfaction is crucial for employee retention and attracting top talent, and taking the frustration out of the development process is just one reason Atom Bank enjoys an 82% score in employee engagement.
Atom Bank has worked hard to gain a 5-star rating in Trust Pilot and in app stores, that is in part thanks to a focus on consistently up-to-date security, applying new technologies, and a continuous improvement of user experience. The implementation of the Google Blueprint helps speed up innovation and drive efficiency, ensuring Atom Bank continues to provide excellent customer experiences.
