Creating a Banking as a Service platform for a global Spanish bank

How can big bricks-and-mortar banks compete in a world of digital Fintechs?

Banking is fundamentally changing. With digital-only challenger banks enjoying rapid growth, the established players must innovate or stagnate. Enter Banking as a Service – BaaS – giving Fintechs access to a traditional bank’s services through APIs.

Our client, a global Spanish bank, was one of the first to recognize the potential of this new capability. So they came to us. In a ground-breaking six-year project, we built a fully automated BaaS platform called Open Platform.

Open Platform was transformational for the bank. It created a future-proof business model that provided new revenue – and made the bank synonymous with innovation.

Open Platform created a future-proof business model.

Nurturing a pioneering partnership

For our team, it was an exciting challenge and one that demanded a truly collaborative client partnership. We created agile, connected teams, placing over 80 developers in 5 locations across the US and Spain, one of the first companies to use such a distributed working model at the time.

Our perfectly coordinated remote teams built the platform software from scratch. We designed and deployed a continuous delivery (CD) model to accelerate the daily deployment of over 300 services across 10 environments.

Developing advanced automation

Working closely with architecture and DevOps teams, we defined a testing process where code analysis, testing and deployment were all 100% automated. And we followed agile methodologies to manage the process.

The platform was rigorously tested, applying over 6,000 test data-sets to optimize efficiency and ensure a streamlined performance. And, as our client’s trusted partners, we took the onus off the bank, managing the entire process ourselves – almost unheard of in a project with such a valuable asset at stake.

Leveraging our adaptive advantage

From our remote teams to our cutting-edge software, our adaptive approach was critical to the success of this project. The launch of this global bank into the BaaS space was truly game-changing and they continue to be ranked as one of the best banks in the world.