Howden Group: xTrade platform
**Business Challenge**: Howden, the leading European broker servicing clients globally, engages in various sectors beyond insurance, including log files, marketing, and market research. The client faced challenges due to a fragmented product offering, leading to elevated maintenance and upgrade costs, a high total cost of ownership (TCO), and inconsistent delivery timelines, causing slow market entry for new products. Additionally, launching each new line of business or product was associated with substantial development expenses.
**Our Solution**: We developed a single, configurable, API-driven, low-code platform that can seamlessly adapt to all digitalized products. We ensured that configuration files are highly modular to support future scalability of the platform. By creating an API that automates versioning, we optimized product configuration and extension processes, eliminating the need for product specialists to manually organize configuration files. We also introduced test automation, facilitating the testing of large product volumes.
**Results Achieved**: The new platform transformed technology from a hindrance into a significant enabler of business growth. We empowered Howden to launch new products merely by adding new configurations, reducing the time to market from several months to just a few days. The platform considerably lowers development costs by utilizing existing workflows for similar products, minimizing the effort and resources needed for new product development. Custom extensions can also be developed for products that can't be launched solely via existing configurations, with a maximum development time of four weeks.
**Technology Stack**: React, Redux, Typescript, .Net 8, microservice architecture with Onion Architecture and Modular Monolith structure, Microsoft Azure Cloud, Robot Framework, Browser Library, Data Driver Library, Requests Library. Read more.