Digital unsecured cash lending channel
A major EMEA bank wanted to serve borrowers fully digital: from loan application to money on the customer's account in under ten minutes, no call center or branch interaction needed.
After seventeen integrations done, their own engineers continued on stack the day we left. Against an internal expectation of 12 months+, we launched in four months country-wide. The squad we stood up together, still running after five years later.
What the business got
Challenge
A major EMEA bank needed a fully digital lending flow — end to end, no customer representative required at any point.
Our KPI: from application start to money disbursed, under 10 minutes.
17+ internal and external services to integrate, including digital signature, KYC checks and a banking-group-level risk engine. The client's engineering team needed to own the stack after roll-off. Internal estimate was 12+ months, with a previous delivery cancelled at 8+ when it ran over budget.
Strategy
Delivery-led digital transformation: the client's people and ours as one team, with dedicated bandwidth from internal services ready to support from day one and in the same daily stand-ups.
Scalable service architecture with full CI/CD — nobody could touch production by hand, and no configuration was done by hand.
Our delivery
One co-delivery squad: 7 engineers working alongside 6 client engineers and a product owner. No handover at the end — knowledge transfer was built into daily work from week one.
- The most valuable vertical slice scoped, designed and locked before sprint zero.
- Integrations researched up front, risk managed top-down, with an expert for each moved into a multi-disciplinary team.
- Event-driven service architecture with a CI/CD pipeline and automated tests, skeleton built in sprint one.
- A pairing rotation ensured client engineers owned each integration as it shipped.
Outcome
- Launched in 4 months, against the year the bank estimated internally.
- A 10-minute loan — no representative needed, money landed on the customer's own account.
- 17+ integrations live, including the banking group's risk engine.
- 0 manual production touches or fixes; everything as code.
The digital lending squad stood up during the delivery is still running at the client today — five years on, delivering new revenue-generating functionality standalone, with no dependency on an external provider. The client built three more digital labs on the back of it.
Client testimonial
"Without Sandor and his team scoping down to what matters, we wouldn't have finished in a year, eating up all the budget with nothing to show for it. This way it is one of our most successful product lines, looking at revenue over cost alone."
— Product Line Sponsor
The team setup
The squad supported by committed bandwidth from the bank's own functions from day one, part of the same stand-up as necessary. The strategic importance of the project enabled the team to move with the least impediments possible.
Scope
Build · high effort
Integrate · moderate effort
Reuse · least effort
Digital signature · −3 months
Squad
Product owner and tech lead
5 engineers
3 integration engineers
5 subject-matter experts
8 more experts supporting from their own units, on a standing commitment rather than a ticket queue
Whose people
ours
the client's
The container architecture
Containerised micro-services abstract away the external world's legacy interfaces, which is what let the squad develop fast and automate the developer experience end to end. The adapter service pattern separates the effects and the two different technical worlds — including the FlexCube core in this case.
Choreography-based pub-sub: a property change on the loan application triggers whatever reaction each independent worker service cares about. A wave of reactions is the price of total decoupling — every worker is maintained and released on its own.
The app state manager is the one high-speed single-instance service, one per key. It merges the states and writes to the loan database append-only, so every record is also the history of its own change, which is what the regulatory reports are built from.
Adapter services keep this system's architecture decisions on one side and do whatever the designated external integration needs on the other. They dampen external change and let us test end to end without the third party's cooperation — including over core systems.
The delivery calendar
Scope was locked before sprint zero, yet complexity underestimated, openness to the ruthless cutting of unnecessary complexity let us deliver on time.
Integrations ran as a workstream inside the squad, pairing engineers working on features with engineers working on integrations necessary for those features created smaller groups pushing real value out of each sprint.