Evolution in efficiency: A top-tier fintech firm’s journey to a gold-standard DevOps model

Cloud & Platforms

Ways of working

FinTech

Financial Services

5 min read

A top-tier fintech firm, specializing in B2B Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) solutions, has always aimed to provide businesses of varying scales with seamless liquidity access, intuitive automation, and innovative payment methods.

Facing the challenges of an expanding market presence and the need to sustain top-quality customer interactions, the fintech firm chose to partner with esynergy to craft and integrate an all-encompassing quality assurance (QA) plan throughout their payment domain’s software development process. The end goal? To establish a gold standard for QA that could inspire and be implemented by every team in the firm.

The collaborative team’s strategy hinged on diving deep into the DevOps mindset, underpinned by streamlined CI/CD pipelines, swift feedback channels, enhanced monitoring/logging, and an overarching emphasis on robust teamwork. This journey kicked off with a thorough exploration of the existing operational methodologies, discernible trends, and challenges, especially within the payments unit. The next phase was the formulation of a cohesive code-writing protocol to foster uniformity and automation. They also incorporated resilience testing, chaos testing, and specific testing blueprints for JVM-oriented frameworks. These new practices were soon recognized and assimilated by other teams within the firm.

"At esynergy, our mission has always been to seamlessly blend ambition with cutting-edge solutions. Our collaboration with this fintech leader only amplified our respect for their dedication to simplifying financial solutions. It was heartening to see our combined efforts materialize and the palpable enhancements in testing and rollouts; it only reinforced our pledge to conceive game-changing solutions."

Lily Glasson, Account Principal, esynergy

Outcomes from this partnership:

Phase 01

Test automation

Before: 30% reliability

After: 99% reliability

Outcome: Transition from erratic tests to an automated setup boasting a 99% success ratio

Phase 02

End-to-end test execution time

Before: 25 minutes (for 31 tests)

After: 7 minutes

Outcome: Over 300% acceleration in end-to-end testing for the payments sector

Phase 03

Unit & integration test execution time

Before: 23 minutes (for 3000+ tests)

After: 6 minutes

Outcome: Enhanced test times, both locally and in CI, thanks to Docker and parallel processing

Phase 04

End-to-end test CI integration

Before: 0% integration

After: 100% integration

Outcome: Shift from no CI integration to complete CI inclusion with exhaustive report generation and alert mechanisms for each pull request

Phase 05

Parallel testing capability

Before: Absence of parallel testing

After: 100% parallel execution

Outcome: Overcoming previous system constraints to realize parallel test execution, thus drastically improving test durations

Cross-functional impact

Besides the direct influence on the Payments team, esynergy’s inputs had reverberations throughout the fintech company. For instance, their joint venture with an in-house expert ushered in a trailblazing approach to load and resilience testing. This ground-breaking method is now the yardstick, assisting diverse teams in evaluating and reinforcing their operational systems before launch. The widespread advantages reaffirm esynergy’s proficiency in refining testing procedures and enhancing software quality across departments.