Building a digital bank on the public cloud

Challenge

Facit Bank is a digital niche bank with focus on savings accounts and consumer loans. The bank was launched as a supplement to the customer's existing bank and currently serves approximately 35,000 customers in the Nordic market with attractive interest rates on both loans and savings accounts. The bank was built and launched at record speed while all compliance requirements from the Financial Supervisory Authority were strictly followed.

In addition to the new bank being quickly and securely launched, cVations solution had to be a solid foundation upon which new business needs could quickly become a reality and thereby secure the bank a strong position in the market in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.

Solution

cVation assisted Facit Bank in advising, designing, developing and launching the online bank in Microsoft Azure.

The solution, internally called "BankControl", is a central integration engine that connects all technical dependencies within the bank and securely manages the customer process from the website through credit assessment and sales systems to the final destination in the "core bank". This is where money is paid out and it’s provided by SDC. The solution is built on cVations CADD platform, which provides a solid foundation for both the construction, operation, and future development of the system by setting a solid framework for Test Driven Development, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), fully automated CI/CD pipelines in Azure DevOps and technical compliance.

Specifically, CADD has accelerated the development of a system consisting of loosely coupled microservices in an event-driven architecture. This architecture enables the quick deployment of updates without downtime, making the path from business idea to code-in- production short and secure. The bank's microservices are a mixt of Azure App Services and Azure Functions, offering cost-effective automatic scaling and redundancy to ensure a good balance between the system's operating costs and response times.

Azure Service Bus is used for both asynchronous communication internally between microservices but also as a retry buffer against the many external systems that the bank integrates with. Thus, the solution is resilient against failing external dependencies at all stages of the loan application. The data is primarily stored in Azure Cosmos DB, which is a scalable, fast, and reliable cloud-based document database.

Facts

To comply with financial regulations, we had to integrate SOC 1 & 2 compliance services into the solution. This made the Microsoft Azure platform a natural choice. It gives the client access to Microsoft’s Cloud FSI compliance program which is purpose-designed to minimize risk and help customers meet strict financial regulatory requirements.

Key technology components:

Azure API Management
Azure App Services
Azure Functions
Azure Service Bus
Azure Application Insights
Availability Tests with Metric Alerts
Azure Cosmos DB
Azure Storage Accounts
Azure Active Directory
Azure Security Center

cVation’s deep cloud know-how and a rock-solid, dedicated team gave us the optimal route to the finish line.

Andreas True, former IT-manager Facit Bank

Result

Just 10 months after cVation and Facit Bank launched theproject, the new internet-based bank went live and started issuing loans and opening savings accounts for their customers in Denmark. Since then, Facit Bank has expanded their business to Sweden and Norway, where BankControl plays the same central role.

The laws and regulations of the 3 countries are different, requiring continuous development of many new features and several third-party integrations to help the bank provide a precise credit assessment for customers in all 3 countries. At the same time, the loan application process has been continuously optimized, including an advanced duplicate check. Since the bank's thorough credit assessment often requires manual processing, cVation further more developed a portal in Angular shortly after go-live.

To assist in the process of bringing a loan to disbursement after approved credit assessment, cVation has also developed a simple case management system in Microsoft Power Apps. Since the launch, Facit Bank's own employees have taken over a larger part of the daily operations, while cVation continues to assist with maintenance and effective implementation of the bank's many feature requests.

We are extremely proud to have developed Denmark's no. 1 online bank, Facit Bank, in just 10 months.

Andreas True, former IT-manager, Facit Bank

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