Our Work

Regarding corporate use, the banking platform had to cater for the different needs of Mauritius businesses. Leandré Roux, Synthesis Senior Developer, says: “The system is not a one-size-fits all. It’s so tuneable. Each company can work differently. They don’t all have to follow the same patterns. You can mandate the way you want to do your business. It can be configured in such a fashion that it conforms to those mandates.”  This allowed Investec Mauritius to provide high tech with high touch suited for the client at hand. Obey Makhuvele, Investec Mauritius Technical Lead, explains: “We get to understand the clients and build tailor-made products for them, which makes it easier for them to give us feedback. It is more feedback for us, which enables us to further improve.”  Consistency  Investec has recently launched One Place. This is a drive to ensure consistency regardless of which platform a client uses to log in. This is important because many clients bank across Investec and have accounts with Investec UK, Investec SA and Investec Mauritius. It was important that the user experience should always remain the same, even when the back end was built differently. Synthesis assisted with this and provided an updated framework. They also improved the tech stack so that things would work better, faster and would be easier to maintain. This, in turn, was a technical win for the group. “This is where Investec is going. They want to unite all the different groups under a single platform,” says Roux.  Security  Security has always been a key component of the platform, explains Jain. “The security priority was thought about right from the start.” The team frequently conducted penetration (PEN) testing in line with this mandate. This is where external companies are paid to try hack into the system and report any vulnerabilities. Roux iterates: “Since we have never failed a PEN test, the findings from our tests have always been a ‘by the way; this came up as a warning. It’s not a security breach issue but you can improve on it if you like.’ It was never a report of we found a big problem and we need to patch it out.” He continues that, “from a security perspective, Synthesis has always gotten it right and that is because Synthesis has a focus on getting security right the first time.”  In addition, Synthesis and Investec Mauritius also created the Transaction Monitoring system, which allows the business to do due diligence when investigating suspicious transactions flagged by the host’s system. This allows the bank to see transactions flagged on a dashboard. The team can then assign it to investigators, who can add documentation and proofs as a workflow. This is then used to generate reports to auditors and the Bank of Mauritius as required.  Forex Trading  An example of this is where Investec offered clients cross-currency trading, but the bank used to decide a rate for the client, which was a very manual process. Alternatively, clients would need to speak to their private banker to confirm the rate. To remove this pressure from private bankers and allow the client to do this themselves, Synthesis built in client trading. Roux explains: “What this entailed is that when you would do a cross currency payment over a certain threshold, the system would no longer select a rate for you. You would get prompted live rates off the market and as soon as you saw a rate that you were happy with, you would lock it in and your payment would be created and traded against that rate.”  Fixed Deposits  This new feature allowed the team to easily set new rates ahead of time, which become active automatically on a set date.  Onboarding  Onboarding changed from a manual process to a seamless automated process, so clients could have a positive experience from the moment they began the Investec Mauritius journey.  A new platform  The old banking system that had been implemented was starting to show its age. It was slow in certain instances, but still usable. Synthesis started building the new banking system in 2015. The updated back end was built on .Net Core, which was released earlier that year. The new system had a 38% increase in performance. However, this was not a simple task, explains Roux. “It’s tricky to build a system that works properly over multiple jurisdictions. Since he accounts are stored, maintained and handled differently, there were a lot of issues to make it look seamless when switching between Mauritius and the UK.”  The old banking platform also needed to be updated to increase the speed for more complex users. Roux explains: “We deal with corporate users who bank on behalf of somebody else. There are a lot of banking data and accounts that need to be pulled to the front end with their balances, spend and transactions. This happened in under a second for personal users, but for corporates, it could be a time-consuming process.  “We are talking about hundreds and hundreds of banking accounts. On the old system, it took a while to complete before we optimised it. Now, the maximum time is three seconds: even with the biggest sets of accounts. The new stack was built to allow for a lot less overhead in processing the data compared to the old stack.”  Jain regards “Mauritius online as one of the most stable customer-facing applications running at Investec. Our old online, before the UX, was also one of the most stable applications. No app is error free, but the recovery time for us as a team to fix an issue or a bug, was small, which adds to client satisfaction. We recently launched the new look and feel. If you look at the journey of how many complaints or problems we have got and if you compare that with other projects that land into client space, I think it was a smooth landing and that clients were happy.”  Building for the future  A significant distinguishing factor has also been using technology that ensures longevity and the ability to make constant updates safely, which ensures client satisfaction.  Regarding the original platform, the foundation created was very strong. “It was ideally designed to last for two years, but it lasted for eight, which speaks for itself,” says Jain.  The same applies to the user experience platform (UXP). “It was suggested from Synthesis to create the microservices form. It was implemented and it is not something we will be writing in a year or two. It is future-fitted the way it was designed,” comments Jain. Makhuvele adds: “We were able to see where the future was going in terms of coming up with a micro-services application that will basically be called in any pattern. We are reaping the fruits of the decisions we have made back in the days. We can dockerise and deploy the microservices into the cloud, which is a huge win for us.”