Over 4 years ago we started the Vodeno project. 3 years ago, our banking platform was launched in the GCP public cloud for the Friends & Family phase. In November 2019, we successfully completed the complete migration of the Belgian bank (Aion) to our cloud. We have already talked about "how to build a bank in the cloud" many times. Almost 3 years have passed since then. The platform has expanded and 4 countries are already operating (Belgium, Poland, Germany and Sweden). During these 3 years, the company's strategy changed and the application layer also changed. In retrospect, we know that apart from these good architectural decisions, there were also those that were wrong (theoretically good at a given moment in time) - for example: separate environments for each country. We are currently running a project called Multibranding, i.e. combining these separate entities one common.

Business has changed as well. Aion is currently focusing on offering its financial services not in direct mode (so-called organic growth) but through partners in the BaaS model (Banking-as-a-Service), who enrich their services with Aion's financial products. From a technological point of view, this way of development also required the definition of new architectural standards (e.g. a consistent and efficient API for BaaS partners) and was a challenge in itself.

If you want to find out in detail what challenges we had, how we managed to address them and what we learned along the way, we invite you to our lecture.

Also check out our interview at Google where we talk about building a bank in the cloud.