A UK-based trending product helping businesses in loan searching and reducing time and costs required. The platform is powered by over 2000 engaged accountants who add value to the system between clients and lenders.
The system needed integration with various third-party accounting solutions and financial APIs for business health monitoring, including built-in advanced analytics for predicting risks and providing business insights based on the credit profile. The solution should also be failover and partition tolerance.
How We Responded
Developed Microservices architecture and Java and NodeJS based services
Used continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) and code review according to Agile best practices
Built a separate space inside an existing portal dedicated to monitoring clients’ financial portfolio
Streamed architecture to process batch uploads
Built RESTfull APIs coherent with the best DevOps practices and OpenAPI specifications, thus allowing lenders to offer loans automatically and maximize their profit
Connected various third-party accounting solutions to gather financial data, helping to indicate the risks and opportunities based on the business’ financial profile
Provided the ability to download and share business Health reports with clients
Built a native mobile app for accountants that simplifies their professional routine
The monitoring system and mobile app for 3000+ accountants, which improved the B2B loan searching services for over a hundred lenders and the UK’s largest banks
The client won the Accounting Excellence award and was recognized as a "Software Pioneer of 2019" in the UK
Lead Software Engineer
The Process: A Stepwise Description
Team & Initiation
Ralabs team of four engineers, project management, and technical lead needed to strengthen the Capitalise development office. The first milestone was the research of possible solutions to the platform’s architecture and the user flows that we did in terms of the first Kanban sprint. Next, the project scope was divided on the 2-weeks sprints using the Scrum project management methodology.
The platform’s existing infrastructure (Kubernetes + Azure) was used from the outset. However, during development, we decided to switch from Concourse CI into the favor of Azure DevOps. These options allowed us to handle the delivery process more efficiently using the Agile management method, and support multiple environments for separate teams and scale them, foster the release process.
Development & Testing
The main requirement was to create a modern tool for accountants. This system has to collect all the data about businesses in a convenient dashboard with an enhanced user experience and a statistical module for advanced analytics.
After resolving the deploy issues and environmental setup, we started developing microservices using Spring Boot (Kotlin) and LoopBack4 (TypeScript) frameworks, adding docker support, pipelines, and deployment configuration.
We were using MongoDB as a data source and RabbitMQ for the events which are streamed inside the system. Redis was used to store temporary cached data.
The most interesting part of the project was to connect the financial APIs and third-party accountant services. The diagram below describes the connection flow of connection between the third-parties services used for monitoring.
Third-party Services Integrations
accounting integrations with Quickbooks, Sage, Xero
Open Banking Service
integration with OpenWrks
Credit Report Service
integration with CreditSafe, Experian, Moodys
Monitor Snapshot Service
to build and aggregate extended company portfolio
Ledger Insights Service
to analyze balance sheet and provide financial insights
Event Streamer Service
to send events (SSE) to the user
Credit Line Service
to store and retrieve credit facilities
Token Store Service
to store and refresh OAuth2 tokens
public APIs for different products
Business Health Report
Provides a view of the client's credit profile, balance sheet, and business funding
benchmarks into easy-to-read custom reports. The system also identifies the
possible debtor risks based on the insights from the Health Report.
Mobile Application for Accountants for Android and iOS
We developed a native mobile app for iOS and Android using Ionic and React Native. This app had to simplify the engagement of the new customers for accountants during conferences and in-person meetings. The app's features allowed accountants to:
Add the new clients' contact details
Look for clients' business data by integration with the data from the U.K. banks and accounting solutions
Initiate the business loans searching
Integrate the data about new clients with the web app
An app was synchronized with iOS and Android and released in the UK.'s Apple and Google Stores.
accounting firms monitoring their clients
accountant’s accelerated workflow
award from Accounting Excellence
raised in investment series A
A Software Pioneer of 2019
Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer
We've worked with Ralabs to add an additional team alongside our core engineering and products teams. They have worked closely with us becoming fully integrated with us and delivering an excellent standard of architecture and engineering expertise.
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