All-Around Audit of a Core Banking System for a Commercial Bank with $5B in Assets

About Our Client

The Client is a commercial bank with more than $5 billion in assets. The bank renders banking and financial services to over 5 million individuals and 22,000 corporate customers from all major economic sectors, including energy, agriculture, construction, and telecoms.

Core Banking System No Longer Supported Smooth E-Banking

The number of the Client’s online banking app users has been growing steadily during the past years, posing higher operational requirements for the core banking system (CBS). Eventually, the CBS started experiencing performance issues during load spikes and required urgent fixes to support smooth digital banking service delivery. The bank decided to involve professional consultants to audit its CBS, define the root cause of problems, and suggest appropriate enhancements. Seeking to prepare its CBS for a projected fourfold increase in the number of e-banking users, the bank also needed to assess the system’s ability to process higher volumes of data and transactions.

The Client first relied on ScienceSoft to develop its web and mobile banking apps in 2016 and had a positive experience outsourcing app evolution to our team in 2022. Trusting ScienceSoft’s decades-long experience in banking IT, the bank decided to engage us again.

All-Around CBS Audit and Consulting on Improvements

ScienceSoft’s experts carefully studied the Client’s business requirements and devised a tailored CBS audit plan. Our experts suggested that the audit should span all IT system layers affecting CBS performance: the application layer, the database layer, and the network layer, including hardware. This would ensure a holistic assessment and help accurately prioritize strategic and tactical improvements for implementation.

ScienceSoft assigned a fully managed team of two PHP architects, two Java architects, a database architect, an Android developer, a DevOps engineer, and an IT infrastructure engineer to conduct a multifaceted audit. Our team started by interviewing the bank’s employees from various operational areas (corporate banking, risk management, lending, customer support, etc.) to understand their challenges and needs. ScienceSoft arranged a set of onsite sessions with the Client to facilitate stakeholder interviewing, explore the day-to-day banking workflows, and inspect the bank’s hardware.

ScienceSoft’s experts studied the available IT documentation and the information accumulated in the Client’s DevOps systems (Jenkins, Kibana, Nexus, and more) to understand the CBS performance patterns and potential enhancements. To obtain deeper insights, our team conducted a range of audits specific to various IT system layers:

• Application layer: CBS architecture review, code review, test quality assessment.
• Database layer: data model analysis, architecture review of the databases and data warehouses, data governance audit.
• Network layer: IT infrastructure audit (including AWS infrastructure audit and vulnerability assessment), banking DevOps audit.

Following the assessments, ScienceSoft provided the Client with a comprehensive report on the issues hindering the CBS’s smooth functioning. The report outlined the ways to fix the CBS’s flaws and bridge IT system deficiencies. Prioritized action steps included:

• Rearchitecting the CBS from monolith to microservices to enhance system scalability and facilitate its future evolution.
• Refactoring the CBS code to improve its readability and maintainability.
• Increasing unit test coverage for new CBS features relying on complex business logic to fix bugs early, prevent regressions, and avoid costly CBS operational errors.
• Setting up a controlled staging environment to enable developers and testers to validate CBS changes before they are deployed to production.
• Implementing a continuous load testing environment to monitor real-time CBS performance and quickly respond to arising issues.
• Splitting the data warehouse into ODS, MDM, OLAP cubes, data marts, and staging data stores to speed up CBS access to the needed data and optimize cloud storage costs.
• Enhancing the incident management and disaster recovery procedures to minimize the impact of potential infrastructure outages.

The Client also received a step-by-step change implementation plan and a map of IT competencies necessary to introduce the proposed improvements.

Tailored CBS Load Testing Farm Rolled Out in 4 Months

The Client appreciated ScienceSoft’s pragmatic advice and decided to involve us in the implementation of the changes. In particular, ScienceSoft’s team handled the design and setup of a continuous load testing environment for the CBS. Our QA and DevOps engineers:

• Established a scalable load testing infrastructure and secure testing environment.
• Determined the CBS performance metrics to monitor (e.g., system response time, response stability, CPU consumption).
• Created capacity, load, stress, integration, and scalability tests to evaluate system performance.
• Introduced end-to-end test cases for popular transactional scenarios (money transfer requests, recurring loan repayments, cash balance checks, tax refund claims, and more) to evaluate their impact on the system load.
• Integrated Grafana into the bank’s existing performance observability toolkit to delve deeper into the system's behavior.

ScienceSoft delivered all necessary QA documentation to help the Client’s IT team quickly master and efficiently operate the new testing solution.

Having rolled out the testing framework, ScienceSoft’s QA team conducted a checkup of CBS performance under regular and heavy load. The obtained insights helped determine the operational bottlenecks in the current system configuration and identify the fault-prone infrastructure components. The Client got a detailed test report describing our testing methodology, test results, and recommended steps to eliminate CBS performance issues.

Solid Technological Foundation to Meet Growing Demand for E-Banking Services

In just 4 weeks, the Client received a comprehensive report outlining the core banking system’s code, architecture, and infrastructure issues and pragmatic steps to address them. Thanks to ScienceSoft’s advice on improvements across the CBS technical design, infrastructure, and testing processes, the bank was able to prevent CBS performance and scalability issues and reduce system maintenance costs. With the swift practical assistance of our team, the bank got a tailored CBS load testing farm launched in 4 months.

Over time, the smooth functioning, higher availability, and faster response times of the CBS led to improved e-banking user satisfaction. Better control over CBS performance and quick problem solving ensured minimized risks of online banking service disruption.

Methodologies

Q&A sessions, business requirements analysis, document analysis, system analysis.

Techs and Tools

PHP, Java, Android, AWS, Grafana, Kibana, Jenkins, Nexus, Swagger, SonarQube, Dynatrace, Bitbucket, Atlas, Kubernetes, Confluence.