Engineering the Front door, Trading Platform, and Back Office of a Swiss Digital Bank

Project snapshot

Our client is a digital-only bank in Switzerland. It has no branches, so web and mobile are the only ways customers interact with it. Its banking license lets it serve customers well beyond Switzerland, and it has subsidiaries in other countries. We’ve worked with the bank since 2020 and now have 32 engineers building five of its products: client onboarding, multi-market trading and pricing, customer data and compliance, eBanking, and mobile trading. Onboarding was our first squad, and the others followed. Our engineers work in Java, React, and TypeScript, plus native Swift and Kotlin for mobile. We choose between monolith and microservice architectures depending on what each product needs.

Business challenge

For a bank with no branches, every gap in onboarding, trading or mobile banking shows up as lost customers. Acquiring customers in Switzerland and across Europe is expensive and competition is heavy, so a clumsy account-opening flow costs real money. Clients also expect to trade and bank from a phone as easily as from a laptop.

In 2020, the bank relied on a single engineering vendor. It wanted more capacity and a wider pool of expertise, so it invited Intellias and a couple of other vendors to work with its teams. Swiss banking adds another layer, with strict rules on security and data privacy. The bank needed partners who could do banking-grade engineering inside those constraints, not just add people.

Solution

We started small, with one to three engineers working alongside the bank’s own team on onboarding. The goal was to show that we could deliver inside their processes. Six months of feedback later, the bank started giving us more of the platform. By the end of 2021, we had about 20 engineers on the account.

Today, five squads work on products that share back-end components but deliver very different value:

• Onboarding
  The bank’s front door. We build microservices, web front ends and mobile apps that turn a prospect into a verified, compliant client, fully digital. A smoother flow means fewer drop-offs in a market where every new customer is costly to win.
• Trading and pricing
  Trading across around 30 stock exchanges in North America, Europe, and Asia. The platform covers several instruments, including shares, options, commodities, and crypto. We focus on stocks and commodities. The bank’s in-house team owns crypto, which is a major revenue line for the bank.
• Customer data
  A client lifecycle management platform for anti-money laundering and know-your-client work. It holds risk models, profiles and documents, and acts as the single source of customer truth for other teams. Nothing in it faces customers. Its users are bank employees.
• eBanking
  The mobile banking experience that customers use every day: accounts, transfers, cards, savings accounts, and loans.
• Mobile trading
  A dedicated squad for trading on the go, so clients can act on the market without a laptop. The bank set it up as its own team because trading on mobile deserves full-time focus.

Mobile is where our expertise made the biggest difference. About three years ago, we became the first vendor to bring mobile engineering to the bank. Strict security limitations stood in the way, so we built proof of concept at no charge to show it could be done safely. It worked. The bank now runs dedicated mobile squads with us, with native apps in Swift for iOS and Kotlin for Android.

Across all five products, we pick the architecture that fits the business need, whether that’s a monolith or a set of microservices, rather than forcing one pattern everywhere.

Business outcomes

• From proof to ownership: the bank moved from trialing us with a few engineers to trusting us with the systems that acquire customers, process trades, handle compliance, and run daily banking. The team grew to about 20 engineers by the end of 2021 and stands at 32 today.
• A new capability for the bank: the mobile proof of concept became dedicated squads for both eBanking and trading, giving the bank an in-app experience it hadn’t had before.
• Ready for AI in a regulated market: the bank has received regulatory approval to use AI, which is a high bar under Swiss data privacy rules.