Currency Exchange and Your Everyday Bank with the User in Focus

Family-owned FOREX Bank AB (publ) has been the Nordics market leader in travel money since the start in 1965. In 2003, FOREX Bank obtained its banking license and expanded its customer offering with easy-to-use banking services such as deposits, loans, payments, cashier services and debit and credit cards. 

FOREX Bank had a neglected architecture which led to expensive maintenance and a high cost of change. There was a need to move forward to a more modern solution and to move from on-premise hosting to the cloud.

FOREX also requested a facelift of the website. Both in terms of the design and user experience. Being able to utilize the synergy effects of the currency exchange and the banking services of FOREX provided a unique challenge for the team.

The new website is developed on Optimizely. The new native apps are on Android and iOS and serve the customers with functionality like currency purchase in mobile. To support these platforms and to lay the groundwork for the new IT architecture at FOREX, a service layer with microservices running on Docker and Kubernetes in the Azure cloud was developed. External API services was build using the Azure API Management framework.

A pre-study looking at different alternatives for commerce platforms resulted in a decision from FOREX to build a custom e-commerce platform to support currency purchase. This was developed with React as framework both for the service layer and web application for administrating orders.

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On the technical side, the project gave us at FOREX Bank a better understanding and overview of the architecture. Also a better tracking of the different services and dependencies required for delivering the service we wish to our end user. This in turn gives us a possibility to faster detect and fix problems before the users spot them and if the problems is due to a third party system we are better equipped to rate their performance and at an earlier stage ask them to fix certain things.

A More User-Friendly Interface

The project also resulted in better user experience for the workers at FOREX Bank. The custom e-commerce platform resulted in less time spent on admin and a more user-friendly interface that, in turn, has made it easier to onboard new co-workers.

We also put a lot of effort into the new CMS interface in order to make the web editor's job faster and easier. For example the possibility to reuse blocks, scheduling functionality and using dynamic data to minimize workload and errors when updating rates, fees and documents. But most importantly it resulted in the site delivering more currency transactions and more applications for the banking products.

Happier customers and a more modern and visually pleasing site in turn, I believe, has made us at FOREX Bank more proud of our digital channels.

- Helena Eriksson, Digital Channel Owner at FOREX Bank

Close and transparent communication between all stakeholders was a prerequisite for being able to make the right decision at the right time. It made sure that everyone had the same understanding of where we were headed and how we would get there.

By focusing on automation and conventions for development early in the project the team was able to quickly support growth within the team when needed. New members of the team could rapidly become productive and when needed the development could easily scale up.

To realize the goal of a renewed digital presence for FOREX, a wide variety of skills were required. During the project Valtech provided a cross-functional team with experts in various roles within design, user experience, architect, development, project management and digital strategy. Together with the expertise and vision of FOREX, the goal was able to be fulfilled.