Bitpanda

Overview

Bitpanda is an Austrian company founded in 2014 on a mission to reinvent the world of finance. Bitpanda is actually one of the fastest-growing fintechs in Europe. Their platform is rooted in the belief that investing should be safe, easy and accessible to all. Bitpanda has grown to a team of 600+ people and their innovative technology serves over 3 million users and operates across multiple hub locations and it is willing to expand their customer base to over 30 million by the end of 2022.

Goals

Develop a new customer registration/login webapp to prepare the platform for the new end user as well as white label solutions.
Implement a reliable system to acquire user data for analytics and marketing decisions.
Implement improvements on the user journey and investigate their impact by means of AB Testing.
Refactor many parts of the existing backend (PHP Monolith) and migrate it to a micro service approach.
Implement a reliable approach to QA using automated testing to make sure that the code that reached production was reliable, minimizing unwanted results.

technologies used

Backend development:

PHP
Java (Kotlin)
SQL and T-SQL

Frontend development:

Typescript
Angular

Mobile development:

Kotlin (Android)
Swift (iOS)

QA:

Selenium & Apium
TestRails
BrowserStack

Product Management Tools:

Segment, Heap and Braze
Google Analytics
LaunchDarkly

Results

Implemented the first AB Test of Bitpanda on a customer onboarding journey.
Improved the performance of the OAuth token endpoints cutting response time from 2secs to 0.3secs, preparing the platform to absorb a bigger volume of users.
New onboarding webapp written completely in Angular, with a high degree of flexibility to adapt the user journeys to the different requirements of different countries and clients.
Migrated the onboarding process in the mobile apps to a modularized architecture to align with Bitpanda architecture and ensure the independence of our team to add features to our part.

Challenges

The scale of the project and the team - Bitpanda is an organization with a team of more than 300 developers. Getting to know the project, processes and people, as well as adapting to their workflows is something that was not trivial. We manage to adapt to the existing ways of working while proposing alternative workflows that could help all of us work smoother.
Implementing an automated QA approach - When we joined Bitpanda each team had manual QA agents and there was a centralized automated QA process that ran a battery of test automation before each release. We proposed to implement an automated QA process on a team level, with more tests with deeper checks that ensured that our releases had gone through manual and automated verification before merging our code to the main branch.
Implementing a flexible user onboarding portal - The old user onboarding portal was developed many years ago using PHP server side rendered views. Bitpanda needed a new version of the portal to fulfill its needs, since the amount of users and circumstances to be managed now could not be covered by the old version. We developed an Angular portal that could expose different user journeys and legal requirements depending on the nature of the customer registering.

What we did

AB Testing for mobile apps: a) We implemented a framework that allows us to prepare different user journeys based on an AB testing scheme provided by LaunchDarkly b) Along with the marketing analytics tools, this allows us to make decisions based on data and to gather information about any potential improvement in the app before shipping it to the stable release.
New onboarding portal: a) Frontend project developed in Angular to provide registration and login functionalities to the users b) The project features an internal state machine engine that allows it to adapt to the legal needs of each country and situation. c) API based backend - migrating a PHP monolithic application.

Business Impact

Apiumhub worked with Bitpanda since July 2021 until March 2023. Bitpanda recognized Apiumhub as one premium partner to lean on for critical tasks.

Apiumhub’s goal was to refactor the whole accounting and user management system, as Bitpanda had grown a lot in user base, the platform could not sustain the traffic under load.
Apiumhub worked along internal Bitpanda teams to provide a new architecture, microservices and went to low level to optimize security protocols to make the platform support more load.

In parallel, we also refactored the whole Login/Registration microservice in Web frontend (Angular), Android and iOS, implementing past missing features such as AB Testing, feature flags and user behavior analysis tools.