Award nominated work for a British government-owned business development bank
- Client
British Business Bank
- Services
Ruby on Rails, API, and frontend architecture and development
- Description
Developed a scalable, secure, and compliant product that could quickly be adapted to support pandemic demands.
Shortlisted for
1
Banking Tech Award
Over
£78B
pounds loaned
Supported nearly
80%
of UK's market for SMB finance
Award nominated development
After loaning more than £78 billion and supporting nearly 80% of the UK's market for smaller business finance, the Guarantees Portal API thoughtbot developed, was shortlisted for best “COVID-19 Response by Financial Institutions” at the 2021 Banking Tech Awards.
thoughtbot is approved as a G-cloud supplier on the UK Digital Marketplace and is ideally positioned to help other UK public sector entities with cloud delivery and support services.
Improving scalability and flexibility to meet demand
British Business Bank is a government-owned business development bank, and has been a thoughtbot partner since it was established.
British Business Bank partnered with thoughtbot to rebuild their application with stronger architecture. thoughtbot efficiently managed features, fixes, and optimisations as client needs changed post-launch.
Then, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK government introduced urgent new loan schemes to keep businesses afloat. The scale and speed at which British Business Bank was required to approve loans and distribute funds was unlike any previous situation, and having the technology and capabilities to serve customers in a timely manner was paramount.
Supporting architecture, frontend and backend implementation, and cloud migration
thoughtbot primarily supported the architecture and implementation of the application (front and backend) as well as the creation of the corresponding APIs powering the new loan schemes. Given the amount of expected activity, scalability was essential.
In April 2021, thoughtbot moved on to supporting the rollout of the Recovery Loan Scheme, the successor to the COVID-19 schemes.
In parallel, thoughtbot also supported a cloud migration from UK cloud to Azure. thoughtbot worked closely with BBB's operations partners to reconfigure the application and seamlessly migrate to the new Azure platform with minimal downtime and disruption.