Taking banking beyond the norm

2 min read

Designing a digital, cloud-based banking system

Kiwibank – proudly the only bank to be 100% New Zealand-owned – has always welcomed opportunities for innovation. So when its core banking system started showing its age, it decided to go beyond simple replacement to a smarter, tech-based solution designed by Abletech.

In today’s world, smart technology is a ‘must-have’ for most businesses and one of the keys to their success. So when Kiwibank’s aging and unwieldy banking system – which relied on large, unsupportable, monolithic software – was no longer fit for purpose, it saw an opportunity to go digital and take the business to the cloud. The logic was undeniable: among its many benefits cloud-based computing improves data security and operational efficiency, reduces infrastructure costs and increases reliability and performance.

Kiwibank chose Abletech to help design the cloud-based digital bank, which would comprise services with well defined APIs that could be pieced together to support a range of customer types and uses – for example by providing an online experience for people wishing to join the bank.

The process was thorough. After producing an initial design of the online user experience, the team built a ‘working’ prototype for testing it with potential users. And on the server side, a family of cloud-based microservices was tested to ensure it would work in real time. All the services would be deployed as code to AWS (the Amazon Web Services data centre in Auckland).

While Kiwibank ultimately chose to adopt an on-prem SAP solution, the online system is still based on the Abletech architectural blueprint.

The Abletech way

Delivered UX wireframes, and design
Built a prototype and conducted user testing
Worked with architecture to build up microservices blueprint
Designed services, api, documentation using Open API/swagger
Worked closely with client using an Agile process

Technologies used in the solution

Microservices
Terraform
AWS / ECS / RDS
Hashicorp Vault / Consul
Ruby on Rails

Other sources: https://www.kiwibank.co.nz/about-us/who-we-are/our-history/, https://www.trintech.com/blog/2018/09/how-the-banking-industry-benefits-from-cloud-computing/