Success story / Nearshore software development

Nearshoring partner for internal application development for Berenberg

Modular architecture ready for microservices

Cloud-based application

Remote collaboration on a daily basis

Project Brief

The close collaboration of Profinit and Berenberg as one agile team implementing business requirements for the Securities Workbench project.

Our collaboration with Profinit on the Securities Workbench project exemplifies how distance is no barrier to achieving innovation and teamwork at its best. Together, we’ve crafted a scalable, future-proof platform that not only meets today’s needs but is ready for tomorrow’s challenges. The seamless integration of our teams and the expertly designed modular architecture forced us to establish a long-term cooperation with Profinit.
Marcel Pochert
Head of Digital Transformation at Berenberg

Project background

Berenberg, one of Europe’s leading private banks, was looking for a partner to outsource internal application development.

Profinit provided a nearshore software development team to work together with a team from Berenberg to develop applications and fulfil their business needs. The Profinit team covers the roles requested by Berenberg – Senior Full Stack Developer, Business Analyst, Application Architect and QA/Test Manager.

The collaboration started with the Securities Workbench project which facilitates investment advisory services in securities. The project is about client classifications and investor profiles pursuant to the German Securities Trading Act (WpHG).

Profinit brought their expert knowledge of full-stack development (Koltin, Spring, Angular in this case), project organisation and governance. Together with Berenberg we stabilised the Securities Workbench project, designed a modular architecture, migrated the project from on-premise to Azure DevOps, and implemented new modules.

Business needs

The nearshore software development needed to meet the following specifications:

Capacity for developing and maintaining internal applications
Standardization of the process for investment advisory services in securities into one system

Challenge

We needed to set up an intensive collaboration between Prague and Hamburg, where Berenberg is based. While remote work for part of the week is standard these days, working together for months without meeting in person can be challenging. We had to address this to keep the team efficiency close to what we would achieve working together in one office.

Solution

We created a team and processes to make nearshoring collaboration smooth and efficient. At the start of the project, we focused on team building by working at Berenberg for a week, allowing all team members to get to know each other personally.

Later, the Berenberg team also worked with us in Prague at our offices. Meeting in person from time to time significantly increases team efficiency. Even working together remotely, we functioned as a single team, collaborating daily and using agile methods, such as daily stand-ups via video call.

We designed a modular architecture that simplifies development and deployment while setting certain boundaries to ensure future maintainability. This architecture allows easy transformation of the modules into independent microservices, should this be needed in the future.

We implemented new modules for client classification and a dashboard according to business requirements and migrated the application to the cloud.