Growing coverage in the Nordics with the addition of the SDC banks
The deployment of banks on the SDC platform, such as the Eika group in Norway, has enabled us to reach close to full market coverage across Norway and Denmark.
The deployment of the banks connected with the SDC platform has been a substantial achievement for the Neonomics team; increasing our market coverage and resolving a tremendous technical challenge.
The SDC platform is a general IT platform chosen by hundreds of banks to provide their PSD2 APIs for third-party providers like Neonomics to consume. If you think that connecting to this platform was to build one connector, think again:
Rishabh, our Software Engineer that has been working on the project, explained the challenges involved:
“Connecting the banks on the SDC platform has been a tedious process — it involves 108 banks, which is a vast number of connections. We had to create separate configurations for each of them, working with one by one bank. If anything went wrong, we had to re-correct each connector manually.”
It was a combination of a vast number of connections with many configurations for our applications. “We also experienced problems in deployments due to limitations on server resources and on a concurrent number of connections to other applications,” Rishabh says. -This was later restructured by Alex Filgueira, one of our engineers. “The support team at SDC also made a strong effort to assist us throughout the challenges.”
“This was the reason for why the deployment of the banks on the SDC platform has been the victim of constant re-prioritisation; the challenges we met with these banks always made us release other banks first,” says Anton Lytvynovskyi, our bank Integration team Product Owner. “Nevertheless, we never gave up the battle; a significant milestone was when we could start testing these connectors in production.”
However, there they encountered another issue: “We did not have many internal accounts for testing in the R&D team, which meant we had to request help, either from the top management or with our external contacts, who set aside time to help us with testing.” It was not simply a matter of sending an authorisation link for a test so that the helpers could test on their own time; they had to set aside time and put other priorities on hold. Anton continues: “The unique feature with SDC is that the end-users consent is valid only for 5 minutes, which meant we had to be efficient to complete all the activities within this time (i.e. getting consent, initiating payment, get auth SCA URL and authorizing SCA URL). Since we have detailed test cases(up to 40 test cases) for each connector, this meant we had to get consent for each of them and SCA also in some cases.”
Due to the deployment of the SDC platform, we now finally have all the banks in the Eika group in Norway, which brings up the total market coverage in Norway. Although Eika has many small banks, their total market coverage in Norway makes a strong contribution. In addition, the inclusion of the SDC extended the Danish market coverage. Many of our existing clients have been waiting for these banks, so this makes us even more grateful for all who supported us towards achieving this goal. On a final note, we wish to thank all of our contacts who have contributed to test these connectors — some of them even during their vacation time!
Now to achieve our next big goal — full coverage in Europe!
By Madeleine Josefine Øksnes
