FiveDegrees


Customized banking platform implementations

five°degrees creates software for fully digital banks. Their core product is Matrix, a single intelligent platform that supports customer onboarding, transactions, documents, and all customer interactions.

Matrix is designed to be applied on and connected to any (legacy) core banking system, letting one create a 360-degree customer view and personalize the customer experience.

What we were asked to deliver

In order to meet requirements and needs of the specific banks, five°degrees needed to expand its business with customized implementations of the Matrix Banking Platform to several clients in the Dutch marketplace on top of the ongoing product development.

The Matrix mid-office core banking solution powers Van Lanschot Bankiers, Argenta, KNAB, Crédit Agricole, ABN Amro and many more. Levi9 has helped to build and modernize the product while implementing many of these projects.

Levi9 engineers are familiar with all well-known types of checks and acts used in banking processes: KYC, PEP, AML, FATF, FATCA, as well as some Dutch specific checks: VIS and EVA.

Fintech know-how. Built into our teams.

Integrating Fintech services and applications through API’s is what we do on a daily basis. We bring experience and development power to your Fintech ambitions.

“There’s so much mutual trust between us that we don’t even think of them as a vendor anymore.”

— Martijn Hohmann, CEO  five degrees


Backbase


Modern software architecture & product design principles

Backbase has a rapidly growing customer base and they wanted to bring its Omni-Channel Banking Platform to the next level, introducing modern software architecture and product design principles.

Backbase is known for their state-of-the-art digital banking software solution that unifies data and functionality from traditional core systems and new Fintech players into a seamless, digital customer experience.

What we were asked to deliver

Backbase requested Levi9 to provide several co-located software development teams, to work on the new backend services and widgets collections for its Digital Banking Services.

Given the history of successful cooperation, technical expertise and knowledge of the Backbase ecosystem, Levi9 was the go-to partner to satisfy the growing need for high–skilled software developers, quality assurance engineers and business analysts.

Grow your business, stay flexible, bring expertise in

Scale with agile teams from Levi9

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“Our people experience the team in Kiev not as an external team, but as part of our own development teams.”

— Thomas Fuss, Chief Technology Officer, Backbase. 


Valitor


Software development, security testing & training

Valitor is a leading omnichannel payment solutions and processing company that operates internationally, offering services to partners, merchants, banks, and cardholders around the world.

The cooperation with Levi9 started in October 2015 with a single team and has been increased to multiple teams working on several software platforms and applications.

What we were asked to deliver

For Valitor, security is a key priority. As a licensed payment processor, they have strict regulations and very high compliance standards. Valitor’s own software developers get a yearly external security training.

Besides the ongoing software development, Valitor requested Levi9’s Cyber Security Team to perform security testing on their main applications and to organize an on-site security training to raise awareness and importance of software security.

The toughest certification.

The Levi9 Cyber Security Team (CST) consists of highly skilled professionals such as Security Engineers, Security Trainers, GDPR Trainers, Members of ISM. We’ve earned the OSCP certification.

"I can really recommend Levi9 to anyone that needs to boost up knowledge on Secure Development Practices.”

Gunnar Sigurjónsson, Chief Operating Officer at Valitor.


Essent


Full technical ownership of the B2B platform for Essent Zakelijk

When we started working on Essent’s B2B platform Unity back in 2016, the system was a large Java legacy platform with over 1 million lines of intertwined code, running on premise. Change was hard, development was expensive and the technical debt was high. Now, Unity is a system based on a modern microservices architecture, running on Kubernetes on AWS, with mature DevOps processes and with a fully automated test regression suite.

Case Overview

The story of the transformation of the Unity system is a story of combining all best practices of Levi9 to achieve high-performing and happy development teams, to ensure that Product Owners can reliably promise the delivery of Epics to their business and for operations to come to low costs of change, low running costs and reliable software quality.

DevOps

Development teams are fully aware of how the system behaves in production. They are able to provision environments in the cloud as they need them. Pipelines and infrastructure are automated to reduce human errors in the process.

Kubernetes on AWS

Migrating from on-premise to AWS reduced costs, and increased flexibility and scalability. Microservices can be deployed without downtime. Kubernetes saves 20% of AWS running costs.

Test automation

Regression testing has been reduced from several days to half a day, using test automation with Cucumber.

Continuous improvement

Technical and organisational initiatives are planned and followed up on a quarter by quarter basis, aiming at improving all hard and soft Key Performance Indicators.

Agile visibility

Agile metrics and continuous improvement, together with microservices and DevOps increased the delivery output and engineering efficiency with 80%.

Microservices architecture

Moving gradually from a monolithic architecture to microservices reduced development time of epics with 33%.

Code quality

Automated code quality controls using Sonarqube and the microservices transformation improved code quality with one full point (as measured by Software Improvement Group)

Business monitoring

Business monitoring allows business users to detect at which moments contracts are most likely to be signed.

Delivering a powerful B2B contracting and billing platform.

Sales, contracting, billing, redelivery and customer lifecycle management, all in a state of the art Java system.


IT Operations

IT Operations

Modern software development processes require involvement of the IT Operations element from the very start of the development project.

IT Operations is the enabler of automated delivery of the software through Continuous Delivery practices. It glues together different parts of the development process and enables faster time to market. Modern-day infrastructure/environment setups are described as a code and can be recreated whenever needed as many times as needed. When a product is put into production, keeping an IT environment running smoothly, requires constant supervision. There is a continuous need to install security patches and application updates, monitor the system status and its performance to identify and prevent potential problems, and when they do occur, quickly resolve issues regardless of the time of day or night during which they occur.

Hosting suppliers have made decisive progress to enable remote management of all software hosted in the Cloud or on virtual or physical servers.

This enables outsourcing of these activities to external parties and makes the physical location of the outsourcing party irrelevant. Still, being in the right time zone is important for daily contact between the customer and the service provider.

The Levi9 IT Operations Services consist of reactive/preventive and adaptive/innovative components. The reactive/preventive part of the service takes care that the systems are running smoothly through constant monitoring, updating/patching and incident resolution, whereby the adaptive/innovative part makes sure that systems meet changing business needs through change management. The innovative part is usually an integral part of Agile development. DevOps principles, supporting development teams, enable faster time to market for the customer’s software.

Our software development practices are based on the Agile and Lean methodologies

Software development teams are usually organized into multi-functional poly-skilled Scrum teams following DevOps recommendations. Depending on the stage of the product in the software development lifecycle, we might use Kanban, if the product is requiring more support related activities as opposed to further enhancement/innovation activities.

We provide remote IT Operations services in the following areas:

  • Cloud and Container Management
  • Infrastructure Automation
  • Configuration Management
  • Continuous Delivery
  • System Management
  • Virtualisation Services
  • Database Administration Services
  • Generic and specific packaged application services
  • Hosting services

Years of experience in various industries


Fintech and finance

Technology and innovation for challengers in the finance world

E-commerce

Growing revenues for electronic retail

Digital media and advertising

Programmatic web and data solutions for advertisers

Traffic and Transport

Intelligent Traffic Solutions, Mobility as a Service and Public Transport Solutions

Independent Software Vendors

Scale-up solutions for software companies

Digital platforms

Technology solutions for Digital Platforms

Telecom

IoT, Blockchain and Integration solutions

Industrial automation

Robust technology for industry-grade applications


Agile visibility

Agile visibility services

Levi9 provides services that help software development organizations to adopt agile processes in order to realize their full benefit: creating predictable output, achieving early ROI, delivering constant quality, lowering cost, ensuring a better product fit and facilitating innovation.

Agile = evidence-based acting. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.

Our agile visibility services include:

  • Assessments of the current state of an organization
  • Identification of valuable of metrics
  • Assisting in establishing internal agile advocates
  • Agile training and coaching

Agile implementation: Recognizing the Value

While agile implementation can be challenging, the ultimate reward of this investment is the result of higher customer satisfaction through continuous delivery of value-based, quality software.

Agile organizations aim to build the right software at the right time. Positive outcomes such as improved teamwork, better communication and other non-tangible benefits are difficult to measure. However, outcomes such as a reduction of risk and defects, technical debt, defects and development costs are measurable factors.  It’s important to quantify and utilize these metrics before and during your agile transformation. Review of these metrics will help drive sound decisions and provide better insights to performances of teams.

Agility services are based on 3 important principles:

Continuous improvement is based on data – Performance metrics are used to signal trends

The data is used by the team

The data is surrounded by conversations

Performance metrics

Predictability

Agile does not mean having no plans. Instead, agile requires a constant replanning. But, at the same time, we want plans to be predictable in nature. So, how do we achieve predictability? We are measuring the velocity of the teams and their capacity in man-days to achieve an important metric, the Focus Factor. We also measure the trend of the Focus Factor over time, to come to a figure that we use as planning input. The next metric that is needed in this equation is the Delivery Rate, an indicator for the commitment accuracy of teams over time.

Scope of Change

Another important metric is the Scope Change. Added and removed work during sprints often is an indicator for poor backlog readiness – or it may be induced by other disturbing factors – such as the Product Owner or the business changing its mind during Sprint execution.

Throughput – the number of days that a story is ‘in progress’, relative to its size, quality metrics, team morale and satisfaction – all these metrics are being captured, analyzed and discussed after each sprint. Results and actions are made transparent for all and followed up.

Within Levi9 we have Agile experts who has expertise in various agile methods and has experience in creating and leading customized agile transformation programs and solutions for various sized organizations. They are considered Agile advocates and experts of Agile Frameworks and adhere to those values and principles.

The power of trust

You might wonder – measuring all of this, does it not create an atmosphere of control, a culture of justification, a tool for management to blame? And indeed, this might happen if you don’t apply it in the right way. Introducing agile visibility in the right way is far from trivial.

But when done right, we can achieve great things:

  • Reducing risk and uncertainty
  • Better decision making
  • Establishing trust
  • Predictable delivery
  • High-performing, engaged teams

Years of experience in various industries


Fintech and finance

Technology and innovation for challengers in the finance world

E-commerce

Growing revenues for electronic retail

Digital media and advertising

Programmatic web and data solutions for advertisers

Traffic and Transport

Intelligent Traffic Solutions, Mobility as a Service and Public Transport Solutions

Independent Software Vendors

Scale-up solutions for software companies

Digital platforms

Technology solutions for Digital Platforms

Telecom

IoT, Blockchain and Integration solutions

Industrial automation

Robust technology for industry-grade applications


Secure Wallpaper

Cyber Security

Cyber Security Services

Cyber-security threats pose a great risk for business operations. Attacks potentially enable hackers to make damage by disrupting our systems or even worse stealing our data. The role our of cyber-security service is to prevent that from happening.

We are supporting our customers in the areas of:

  • Threat Modeling and Security Analysis
  • Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing
  • Cloud Technical Security Assessment
  • Application Security Testing
  • Training Services

Threat modeling and Security analysis

For threat analysis, we use the STRIDE model. Based on the findings, the classification of findings is bases on DREAD methodology or CVSS. The outcome can be used for Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing

Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing

Identify vulnerabilities in the network, server and system infrastructure. Services are complementary while vulnerability has a largely automated approach and penetration testing is mainly an expert activity.

Approach based on MITRE guidelines.

Cloud technical security assessment

Providing assessments on customers’ cloud environment bases on Cloud Security Best Practices.

Application Security Testing

Focus on security testing of custom-made applications, tailored made approach based on OWAP guidelines.

Training services

Creating security awareness and knowledge of people by sharing experiences, training and organizing Capture the Flag competition. Our training services encompass Security, GDPR awareness and secure development training

Years of experience in various industries


Fintech and finance

Technology and innovation for challengers in the finance world

E-commerce

Growing revenues for electronic retail

Digital media and advertising

Programmatic web and data solutions for advertisers

Traffic and Transport

Intelligent Traffic Solutions, Mobility as a Service and Public Transport Solutions

Independent Software Vendors

Scale-up solutions for software companies

Digital platforms

Technology solutions for Digital Platforms

Telecom

IoT, Blockchain and Integration solutions

Industrial automation

Robust technology for industry-grade applications


DevOps

DevOps Services

Would you like to deliver faster and have more business agility?

By delivering the right technology (Lightweight Architecture, Cloud, Security and Automation) and Agile process we enable faster deployment possibilities, lead times for change implementation and faster times to restore.

The DevOps practices are complementing Lean and Agile Software Development practices and can be classified into three areas:

Fast Flow

Smooth and fast flow of work from Product Design and Development to Operations and ultimately to the customer

Fast Feedback

Enabling fast feedback from Operations to Development, to facilitate quick detection, recovery and, in the end, to prevent problems from happening again

High Trust

Creating a high-trust culture of Continuous Improvement that allows initiative and experimentation and embeds a culture of organizational learning

Years of experience in various industries


Fintech and finance

Technology and innovation for challengers in the finance world

E-commerce

Growing revenues for electronic retail

Digital media and advertising

Programmatic web and data solutions for advertisers

Traffic and Transport

Intelligent Traffic Solutions, Mobility as a Service and Public Transport Solutions

Independent Software Vendors

Scale-up solutions for software companies

Digital platforms

Technology solutions for Digital Platforms

Telecom

IoT, Blockchain and Integration solutions

Industrial automation

Robust technology for industry-grade applications

High performing IT organizations that are applying DevOps practices are outperforming their less performing competition by

  • Deploying code thirty times more frequent with sixty times higher success rate
  • Having two hundred times faster lead time for implementation of changes
  • 168 times faster mean time to restore the service

These companies have higher growth rates, but also higher employee satisfaction and lower rates of employee burnout. They manage to consistently provide stable, reliable and secure service to their customers. A DevOps approach enables organizations to create a stable way of working, where small poly-skilled teams can efficiently and independently develop, test and deploy code and add value to customers, quickly, safely, securely, and reliably. The DevOps approach allows organizations to maximize productivity, enable organizational learning, create high-trust, high employee satisfaction collaborative culture that helps them win in the competitive market.

Our DevOps principles that we use to ensure continuous improvement in getting business ideas to production are:

  • Reduce batch sizes
  • Limit work in progress
  • Continuously identify and remove constraints and eliminate waste

Levi9 implement Continuous Delivery in 5 areas:

  • Version Control practices
  • Continuous Integration
  • Test Automation
  • Infrastructure Automation
  • Automated Deployment


Cloud

Cloud Services

In the age of disruption, Cloud is an enabler for digital agility; changing the way we live and work, enabling us to do more with less, and accelerating the pace of software development. Enable your business challenges and optimize your value chain by using Levi9 Cloud services.

We strongly believe that Cloud is changing software development in a fundamental way. New technologies accelerate and simplify development.

Cloud services develop extremely fast and they offer:

  • Scalability and flexibility in capacity and costs
  • Pace and simplicity in development by using standard services and serverless technologies.

Using these services and adding to it open source software components and standard business services, and connecting these software services through API’s creates value.

At the same time, the amount of data collected, whether it is structured, unstructured or smart, is multiplying in unprecedented ways.

Years of experience in various industries


Fintech and finance

Technology and innovation for challengers in the finance world

E-commerce

Growing revenues for electronic retail

Digital media and advertising

Programmatic web and data solutions for advertisers

Traffic and Transport

Intelligent Traffic Solutions, Mobility as a Service and Public Transport Solutions

Independent Software Vendors

Scale-up solutions for software companies

Digital platforms

Technology solutions for Digital Platforms

Telecom

IoT, Blockchain and Integration solutions

Industrial automation

Robust technology for industry-grade applications

Levi9 is partner for the largest Cloud providers: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

If you as a digital business want to get the most out of this, you will need a technology partner that understands how to orchestrate software services in a smart way. At Levi9, we can help you with cloud strategy, cloud migrations and cloud assessments


Testing

Software testing services

Levi9 strongly believes that the quality of software is based on synergy of all the parties involved in the effort: Development, Testing and IT Operations. Continuous testing is of fundamental importance when implementing Continuous Delivery or Deployment.

The software testing process will start from the moment when the first line of code is created and submitted to the code repository, to ensure that success criteria and quality requirements will be met and will be compliant with the agreed Definition of Done. A continuous testing platform runs in the background, automatically executing the tests and ensuring that issues are identified almost immediately.

The key benefits of this technique include:

  • Helping extend agile and lean practices across the delivery lifecycle
  • Enabling teams to test earlier and with greater coverage at lower cost
  • Test scripts reusability on different environments
  • Providing teams with continuous feedback on software quality to reduce business risk
  • Committing working code frequently making roll-back easier in case of major new defects
  • Tests are automated and integrated into the build process as early as possible

Years of experience in various industries


Fintech and finance

Technology and innovation for challengers in the finance world

E-commerce

Growing revenues for electronic retail

Digital media and advertising

Programmatic web and data solutions for advertisers

Traffic and Transport

Intelligent Traffic Solutions, Mobility as a Service and Public Transport Solutions

Independent Software Vendors

Scale-up solutions for software companies

Digital platforms

Technology solutions for Digital Platforms

Telecom

IoT, Blockchain and Integration solutions

Industrial automation

Robust technology for industry-grade applications