Greenfield digital banking
The team
Built from scratch. Four leads and senior specialists came across voluntarily from my own teams - anti-fraud and mobile - a plain fact worth stating: people follow the leader. Twelve engineers plus three analysts.
10 weeks, no AI
In 10 weeks, without any AI, we had a working end-to-end proof of concept of the digital banking platform: app + PWA + front + backend. Sign-in / sign-up, dashboard, balance, transaction list, in-bank transfer, profile, notifications (list and push) - all the way from the user to the core banking system and back.
It was built straight in the target architecture: KMP / Vue + Quasar / SSE / CQRS / Java Spring / Saga (moving to Temporal). Every fintech quality criterion - observability, resilience, security, robustness - came in from the start, with test coverage per the bank’s testing strategy.
Milestones
- 10 weeks - an internal stream event in a controlled environment.
- 20 weeks - staging; stakeholders try it themselves.
- 35 weeks - a demo environment identical to production, with obfuscated data.
- 1.5 years - a Minimum Lovable Product (instant payments (SBP), cards, loyalty, compliance, information security): ready and going through the central-bank audit, awaiting the decision on a marketing push.
The through-line
This was speed without AI - proof that the pace comes from the process, not the tooling. The same instinct, plus the foundation built during the turnaround, is what made the later AI SDLC transformation pay off.