Yorkshire Building Society develops app to meet changing customers’ expectations

In the UK, 84% of adults own a smartphone and a rising number use banking apps to manage their day-to-day banking. YBS recognised that to meet its customers’ changing wants and needs, it needed to create a mobile savings app to attract new and retain existing customers, helping it remain relevant and successful in the future.

YBS sought the expertise of Infinity Works to help turn its vision into a fully-fledged self-serve app, based on the consultancy’s experience using agile processes, developing native technologies, and supporting back-end integrations.

As is the case with many established financial services organisations, YBS has a legacy digital estate that was hard to update and struggled to react to market changes. So as part of the brief to build a mobile app, Infinity Works helped YBS’ technology teams to influence the need to build a modern, reliable, and maintainable microservice backend, as well as use underlying agile processes, to support the new digital service.

Having been tasked with helping discover the project scope and deliverables prior to the build stage, Infinity Works ran kick-off workshops and collaboratively the teams recommended building a domain-centric service level to abstract away from existing legacy integrations. YBS saw the power behind the idea of delivering an API built to modern standards which could be used by both the app and in any future digital transformation initiatives the society ran.

Working alongside YBS’ close-knit in-house tech teams, a lean delivery team of eight Infinity Works consultants – including a delivery lead, a tech lead, service engineers, and mobile engineers – started building two native mobile apps: an iOS app written in Swift, and an Android app written in Kotlin. The apps were developed to best support the platform’s design and enable them to utilise the full operating system security features such as biometric authentication – fingerprint or facial recognition.

Apigee was utilised as the platform for developing and managing secure API gateways; and the supporting micro-service layer was built using Spring Boot, containerised on Docker, and deployed into an on-premises distribution of Kubernetes.

Collaborating with other YBS Digital squads that were being formed, Infinity Works helped develop a secure software development lifecycle process, including GitLab-based CI/CD pipelines, to support the DevOps practice of Flow. Proactive and reactive monitoring, including synthetic journeys and monitoring system dashboards, was also used as part of the feedback DevOps practice established. The processes and tooling developed in support of the app have now been adopted more widely in YBS, helping underpin its wider technology transformation programme.

Throughout the engagement, the Infinity Works team were responsible for developing new ways of working and accelerating agile methodologies, helping further enhance internal engineering capabilities and contributing to YBS’ ambitious goals around digital transformation.

Following extensive testing, input, and feedback from users, YBS launched its new Mobile Savings App in August 2020 on both Android and iOS platforms. It has since been downloaded more than 140,000 times and is on track to surpass the initial target of 150,000 downloads within its first year. The app is currently rated 4.7 out of 5 on the App store and 4.5 out of 5 on the Google Play store, and serves between 40 to 50% of daily customer logins into YBS’ digital channels.

Ben Sampson, Director of Digital Programmes at YBS, said: “Our vision was to create a frictionless and feature-rich app that made it easy for our customers to manage their savings with YBS. The Mobile Savings App does exactly that and allows customers to quickly and securely view their savings accounts in one place, make one-off transactions to new and existing payees, and see their account transaction history.

YBS is focused on adopting digital advancement and making it easy for our customers to do business with us, so it has been a pleasure to work in partnership with a consultancy with similar values and culture. Engineers from YBS and Infinity Works came together to form cross-functional teams to design, build, and launch a successful mobile app, fully compliant with PSD2 regulations.”

Ben SampsonDirector of Digital Programmes, YBS

As an organisation focused on customer value, YBS is continuously collecting user feedback and thanks to the fully-automated testing process created, it can deploy new versions of functionality quickly and with minimal operational and compliance risk.