UniCredit

UniCredit is an international banking group with a strong presence in Western, Central and Eastern Europe; through its European banking network it provides access to its products and services in thirteen core markets.

The cooperation started a decade ago with approximately 20 colleagues: mainly .NET developers who developed the loan front-end system (EZY) of the Hungarian bank – at that time also in fixed-price projects. Since then BlackBelt's teams have been working on the digital channels, the integration platform and the payment infrastructure of several countries of the group.

The integration ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) platform of UniCredit CEE provides standardised, unified online integration services for the direct channels of the region's banks. The Java-based ESB is the product of a large Indian open source vendor, for which no expert was found in Hungary – we had a colleague who was already familiar with six or seven such systems.

We took over the operation of the old, Microsoft-based ESB, introduced the new one and built its interfaces; together with the client we built the WSO2-based Java ESB. It is an international project in which hundreds of systems are connected, and the development is ongoing. With the Service Catalog product the integration rules became visible and searchable.

The team: ESB expert, .NET developers, MS SQL developers – 5 people altogether.

Meniga is the transaction-categorising and income–expenditure reporting function of UniCredit's new-generation mobile banking, built on Meniga's third-party back-end. The system was launched successfully in 8 countries, with around two hundred servers.

BlackBelt provides the application owners who, as experts of integration and configuration, are the primary contact persons for Meniga across the organisation. The area is part of the DCS team but operates independently: 2 of the team's 10 BlackBelt colleagues are Meniga application specialists.

DCS (Digital Channel Services) is a multi-channel application that serves mobile and internet banking in ten countries of UniCredit. Our Java team builds the back-end services serving the regional branches: user profile, entitlement, product catalogue, payment and card logic, standing orders, investment and insurance logic. The main challenge of the project was rewriting the entire system, including the migration of the old database structure; the result is a maintainable system with simpler change requests, consistent logging and a simplified database.

The team: Java developers, technical analyst, 2 Meniga application specialists – 10 BlackBelt colleagues altogether.

Our developer takes part in the development and maintenance of UniCredit's customer desk front-end application. The multi-year involvement mainly means new feature development, but bug fixes and go-live support are also part of the daily tasks – in an internationally distributed environment. We have continuously enriched the EZY feature set.

Meanwhile BlackBelt was commissioned to develop DRP as a disaster recovery site; later analysts were also needed and the team expanded to 20–25 people. We developed the credit front system using the same technology for the Hungarian, Romanian and Serbian banks.

The instant payment module is critical infrastructure: it is responsible for the connection between UniCredit's systems and the national banks for every instant transfer, with 24/7/365 availability, according to the EU directive. The Instant Payment Gateway is the proxy between clearing houses and domestic payment engines for the CEE countries.

Our team was fully responsible for clarifying the requirements, designing the technical solution and delivering it on time – in an international environment, in daily cooperation with the Serbian business and support teams. The delivery had to meet strict European and Serbian legal deadlines and high standards on speed and availability: UniCredit was one of the first banks to deliver this service in Serbia. The development team also supported the go-live and the first real-life tests, then trained and handed over the task to UniCredit's international support teams.

Duration: 2 years (June 2018 – June 2020). Team: 1 business analyst, 4 Java experts.

For about two years we acted as client-side quality assurance in UniCredit's CRM project.

– Java, Spring; .NET – WSO2 ESB, Solar ESB, Service Catalog – MS SQL Server, RabbitMQ, IIS, Windows and Linux servers – PowerShell, Bash, SQL – Meniga third-party back-end