Building Asia’s next-generation virtual bank

• The introduction of eight new virtual banks in Hong Kong is a key pillar supporting Hong Kong's entry into the Smart Banking Era within the region.

• Zühlke brought multidisciplinary engineering and DevOps expertise to support the end-to-end development and delivery of the new virtual bank awarded with a digital banking license in Hong Kong.

• Zühlke played a vital role in the setup of tech operations across squads within the virtual bank.

Zühlke supported the end-to-end delivery of an all-new, innovative virtual bank venture in Asia, from technical architecture design to agile development, and supporting the bank post-release in 24/7 operations for a successful launch in Hong Kong.

Asia’s next-generation banking experience

A new virtual bank looks to deliver a suite of retail banking services as well as lifestyle benefits over its digital-only app experience. The digital bank brings on forth the next-generation of banking to Hong Kong through a cloud-based bank built from the ground up with resilient infrastructure and rapid, cost-efficient development cycles.

Zühlke is responsible for the reliable delivery of this digital app built from the ground up using modern cloud-native technologies that offer both high performance and high system observability necessary for the virtual bank.

Adopting DevOps practices, the team overcame collaboration challenges raised when the size of the teams grew exponentially. We managed the complex topology of infrastructures and services by applying development best practices and specifically, using Infrastructure as Code for consistent and repeatable environment provisioning, automated builds, tests, and deployments for fast development feedback loops.

Cloud-based bank built from the ground up

The virtual bank went from granting of licensing to market deployment of its cloud-based digital bank in 18 months. Zühlke brought its multidisciplinary engineering and DevOps expertise to support the bank end-to-end in achieving a successful launch.

Adopting practices like pair programming and code reviews, Zühlke played an active role in ensuring software code quality as new features were developed and released iteratively.

Zühlke experts were pivotal for the implementation and continuous optimisation of operational processes and provided 24/7 support for issues post-release to ensure maximum uptime.

Customer-centricity at the heart of everything

Customer experience is critical for the virtual bank, which means focusing on ease of use, an intuitive interface, and a highly reliable, secure app. An account can be set up in minutes, providing a suite of retail banking services entirely digitally via its app.

Zühlke advocated these guiding principles in every product refinement and prioritisation for the squads to focus on delivering timely features and business value fast for end users.

Scalable quality, fast time to market

The Alpha stage was used to test the app usability and responsiveness, and also to prepare the internal teams for operational readiness — learning how to react in different situations when interacting with the customers.

At every agile development release cycle, customer feedback was collected incrementally, documented and reviewed regularly. The quick feedback loops allowed Customer Service teams stay updated on product domain training and product changes as necessary, while focusing on service excellence and first response.