Software Modernization for a Financial Services Provider

With the aim of building out more efficient business processes, the client was looking to modernize its legacy software. To speed up this transformation, the company was seeking a reliable tech partner that could bring added expertise to the company’s in-house developers.

For more than seven years, the client’s internal team has been developing and maintaining the core system that automated customer management workflows. This means that the system contained a hefty volume of legacy code with multiple dependencies across the clients’ applications.

In addition, the internal development team needed expert support to bring together and facilitate project management and task flows. Internal engineers lacked a well-structured collaboration framework, which hindered teamwork between different employees and departments.

Softage had successfully collaborated with the client’s CIO on a previous occasion, and we were excited to come on board and assist the company’s modernization journey.

We augmented the client’s team with two senior engineers, both of whom possess more than 6 years of professional experience. In close cooperation with the client’s team, the engineers went on to deliver the following business-critical functionality to the legacy monolithic application:

• An autonomous, flexible report generation module based on Jaspers with asynchronous execution and task queue
• Integration with external systems for import and export of customers’ documentation compliant with the local regulatory standards
• A customer communication module automating email marketing and notifications
• Full-cycle data management of confidential management, investment, and unit investment fund contracts

Softage’s developers proved to be instrumental in setting up smooth and efficient collaboration practices across project management tools, such as Jira. Our team managed to introduce systematic task analysis, greatly improve the legacy code quality, and scale up overall productivity.

Although remote, cooperation between our developers and the client’s in-house team was seamless thanks to regular communication and the Kanban methodology adopted on both sides.

By inviting our experts to assist their internal team, the client successfully revamped its legacy business automation system, now operating faster and with greater efficiency owing to improved collaboration practices.

After 10 months and nearly 3,000 person-hours of hard work, the upgraded system is up and running, serving over 1,000 of the client’s corporate users.

One of Softage’s engineers summed up what could be the key lesson from this project: “Regardless of how granular a task is, both the client and the developers must be on the same page to succeed.”