There are yet places in the world where owning a bank account is not an obvious fact of life. It’s usually due to the high costs of maintaining an infrastructure for an electronic payments system. There are also regions where 20% of a dollar’s value would be the cost of printing it. It’s obvious how such factors put an extra financial burden on the region and its citizens. Luckily, fin-tech companies that can change things have begun to appear. iRonin’s cooperation with one such company will soon begin.
Our client’s company was founded 4 years ago. Their life-changing product went live 10 months ago and it already has several thousands of users. Recently, it received support from the local ministry of finance, to be spent on building and perfecting a payments system based on the blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. This system, now with governmental approval, is meant to help the region save on money printing costs as well as give wider access to electronic payments. Citizens who previously couldn’t afford it, because of the limited availability and high cost of bank accounts, will now be able to take advantage of modern financial technology.
The development of this project could have a positive impact on the entire region, e.g. through lowering taxes - a country’s costs, like that of printing money, need to be covered by its citizens. The changes will also make it easier for small, family businesses to grow and stay afloat. As it is, many of these small companies can’t accept electronic payments, which means their only option to make business is through cash transactions. This can be a huge detriment in a world where more and more people pay with their credit cards and phones.
Project plan and the team
Currently, the project is under the care of our client’s ambitious team. They have a wealth of experience in developing banking applications - sadly, each of these experts has a narrow specialization. This is the biggest challenge for the project. Several software developers, all using the same programming language, have to participate in introducing small changes, if these changes happen to touch several areas of the app. The team lacks flexibility and experience in managing a variety of projects. iRonin’s team is a perfect fit for filling those blanks - and so we’re taking on the role of consultants for the project.
Another challenge is a result of the client’s strategy and involves introducing remote work to the entire team. This change will require the whole company’s cooperation and must include all of their internal processes. iRonin’s experts will be able to help with this, as well, as our team has always worked remotely and we’ve gathered plenty of experience over the years. We will support the client in changing their processes and building a remote culture. We’ll also help them reorganize into smaller Scrum teams, which will be able to deliver features more quickly - within days, not weeks. This way, we’ll help the client become more flexible.
The client has put a lot of trust in iRonin’s team. We’ve been recommended for this project because of our previous experience in developing fin-tech products, the high quality of our services, and the expert-level skills of our developers. We want to share our approach to using best practices, small team organization, good communication and choosing the right technologies for the project.
The technologies we chose for this project
Go
Known as the language used most often by startups working with the Blockchain technology, Go is also popular in the banking sector. The main reason for its popularity is the fact that Go natively supports concurrency. Go allows developers to work quickly, has a positive influence on team productivity, is efficient and easy to test. It was chosen for this project because it’s a simple yet performant language for implementing business logic and microservices in an app.
Elixir
This functional language allows for the creation of many processes at a low cost. Elixir is easy to learn and makes developers’ work more efficient The API for the client’s mobile app was written in Elixir, as we believe it’s a good technology for this situation. We’re also using GraphQL, which introduces a modern, flexible API standard. We’ve chosen Phoenix for the web app and API framework.
React Native
The client’s mobile app is based on React Native, a cutting-edge mobile technology which allows for the quick creation of native apps for multiple platforms. It not only speeds up the development of new features, it also makes maintenance and scaling much easier - which in turn lowers development costs. Additionally, apps written in React Native are efficient and easy to integrate with other technologies.
SRE
Site Reliability Engineering is a methodology that allows for extremely effective collaboration between the development and operations teams, all to make product maintenance easier. You may be unfamiliar with SRE, but you’ve likely heard about DevOps, which uses a very similar philosophy. The main difference between the two is that SRE adds tools and processes for putting that philosophical approach into practice.
Our goal in the project is to build a solid basis for SRE, for the entirety of the project and its future iterations. We want to improve existing processes and introduce missing elements into them. To achieve this, we intend to use a carefully selected set of tools:
- Cloud computing platforms - AWS i Google Cloud;
- Hashicorp products - Terraform, Consul, Nomad and Vault;
- Monitoring tools like Prometheus and Grafana;
- CI i CD (Continuous Integration i Continuous Delivery) tools - GitLab, Jenkins, CircleCI and Groovy.
Getting involved
We’re still building the team which will take part in bringing this project to fruition. We’re confident that joining us means the opportunity for rapid professional growth, gaining valuable experience - and it means building a product that will change the world for the better. We need people with experience in the technologies listed above, who are flexible, enjoy remote work and are interested in fin-tech.
If you’re interested in joining iRonin’s team to work on this project, apply! Go to our careers page, talk to us on LinkedIn or email us at talent@iRonin.pl
