Bank al Etihad is a Jordanian bank that takes pride in being built on family values. They offer financial services such as checking and savings accounts, credit cards, and home and business loans to individuals, entrepreneurs, local and global businesses, and the next generation of female leaders.
Bank al Etihad seeks to empower its customers by simplifying everyday banking. They recently contracted with Backendless to modernize their mobile banking app, with stellar results.
Rami Saleem, Director of Digital Channels: That’s a good question, actually, because there’s a huge difference between how it was before – two years ago – and how it is right now. Without mentioning the name of the product and application [we used before], it was not that modern of technology, the user experience was not in very good shape, and we just had many issues. That was the main reason why we needed this “revolution”, let’s call it, to start building a new application that will work perfectly for our customers to fit all their business needs and customer needs. [We wanted to provide] the best user experience, best performance, and to make everyone happy, especially our customers.
You are right definitely, especially when you are removing the development approach to be in-house. Before around two years ago, all the applications and products were built outside the bank. The stakeholders in the bank just provided some requirements and high-level needs and leave everything else for the vendors. But life definitely changed. We are building everything here in-house for the mobile, website, all the products.
Yes, actually we spent no less than three months in the exercise of looking to select a good, solid technology and application that would serve all of our needs. We contacted many big companies actually, went through demos for all these products and applications, and finally made the decision to use Backendless and it’s very clear it was a very wise decision when you look at the results we have today. So thank you guys.
Exactly. When you’re talking about such a critical industry – the banking industry – with these strict regulations and rules, you have to build everything on-premises to guarantee the security of the data for your customers. It’s the most important thing, regardless of anything else.
Yes, and we have the ability to do it to be honest, but really you don’t want to spend a huge amount of time to build such a solid backend. Even if you have the best development team, the best architecture, designer, the perfect guys here in the environment to build it for you, it will still take no less than two years. I’m talking from our previous experiences. To get something really solid, something really scalable, something that will work with pretty high performance for you and your customers. So we were seeking a scalable, solid, secure backend as a service and a very smart API engine and that’s what Backendless does.
Exactly. We are working with a team of six guys today. The development process is very active here with new releases almost every day. It’s not a simple task to show some data, there are very complicated tasks involving really complicated and very advanced algorithms and functionality. With the Backendless development team, we did not face any gap or issues with the team. They are very very advanced developers with a high level of training, high level of professionality to work with any environment. Not just in terms of the technical experience, but also soft skills and technical skills at the same time.
Yes, that’s what I’m doing on a daily basis actually. We have a very beautiful console, very clear, I can just work with it as an interface. I just define the tables and the relation between those tables and then from the console, we start implementing the business logic we need using many of the approaches that Backendless provides. Sometimes we write code using more than one development language, or sometimes we use the Codeless feature in cases where we don’t want to spend the time to hire people to write code. Back to your original question, we are using the console on a daily basis to debug things, to test things, to check everything.
Yes, actually, our road map is very huge. Life in the banking industry has many challenges, and we have many things to be implemented, many features and functionality to be added. Our customers require new things every day and you need to be up to speed. You need to be number one in the market, comparing with the banks and competitors in the industry.