Credit agencies face an incredibly fast-changing world that threatens relevance and established business models.

Practiv deployed a new technology platform on premises, based on Kubernetes and Micro-services, that allows them to change quickly and take new products to market, fast.

The customer recognised the need to re-platform, and embarked on a journey to present a complete rebuild of its products, from a customer portal, to B2B APIs and Batch enquiries. Following a massive data breach in the United States, the company has undertaken a wide-reaching technology refresh that has involved re-organising teams, getting closer to customers, a re-think of products, and technology to deliver at the pace expected by customers.

Practiv unshackled the customer from its mainframe with contemporary, containerised micro-services, we worked to define business objectives, introduce contemporary patterns and processes, manage change, deliver software, and infrastructure outcomes.

How we delivered

Practiv was engaged to lead green-fields delivery of a suite of APIs, to facilitate a contemporary Single Page App (SPA) design for their new customer portal, and integrate with a very guarded enterprise mainframe. The customer’s engineers have a great deal of experience with their back-end mainframes, the algorithms to collect information and calculate risk, but not the delivery of contemporary portals and APIs.

Delivering change at this scale required a number of important facets:

Business Insight

• Business Objectives — Breaking delivery into over 70 requirements, each complex enough to have their own UX and requirements design documents (epic level)
• Project Methodology — Sticking as closely to Agile as the business would allow, and managing stakeholders through that change

Practiv Build

• Build Pipeline — Practiv’s Continuous Integration patterns and processes, delivering through Test, UAT, Pre-Prod and Production environments
• Teaming Arrangement — Teams of Practiv architects and developers, teaching the customer teams to deliver epics concurrently
• Software Delivery — Well defined, well tested, scalable APIs. A micro-services architecture with best practice lifecycle management, and an ability to release fast and often into the future

Practiv Run

• Run Platform — Practiv’s enterprise-scale, containerised deployment model down to the operating system, providing isolation and independent management of each micro-service
• On-premises Infrastructure — We worked with the customer’s global architecture teams to deliver within specific security, regulatory and privacy constraints (there are many, like not using cloud infrastructure). We architected a fresh security environment, networking, fire-walling, DNS, SSL, proxies and more
• Long term support — 24x7 response to any change in application, container or server performance

Practiv will continue to deliver business change for the customer and release new features to their customers in hours, not months. With the the customer product team daring to dream, the backlog of exciting new products and revenue streams continues to grow.

The company is well positioned to help its customers make informed decisions in a time of rapid change.