FCamara

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

 I am the Chief Operating Officer of a bank 

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Offers Savings products and Buy To Let mortgages for professional landlords

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire FCamara to accomplish?

• Develop an end to end Savings platform offering a great customer journey
• To ensure that the bank can launch and manage savings products quickly
• ensuring resilience, performance and security to support the Bank's growth

SOLUTION

How did you find FCamara?

Past Experience

Why did you select FCamara over others?

• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Referred to me
• Individual SMEs known to the Bank

How many teammates from FCamara were assigned to this project?

25

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Design, develop, test and implement a savngs platform and associuated product, customer, and operational portals to enable end to end management of the Bank's savings products.

To ensure that the user experience meets the Bank's requirements to provide a good experieince for customers, to enable customers to select the Bank's products, onboard and manage their accounts - to bank to scale through automation and end to end connectivity with world leading third party solutions.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

• Robust design and customer journeys
• Quality controls over code, integration with the Bank's team and other 3rd parties, performance
• Great teamwork, availability and responsiveness
• Technical knowledge and delivery on time
• System launched on time, performing as designed, and supported 

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Robust delivery to time and plan. Regular daily updates - flexible to any additional / changed requirements 

Specifically - senior FCamara management of hte project took personal pride in ensuring delivery and resolving any issues / updating programme manager and stakeholders

What was your primary form of communication with FCamara?

• In-Person Meeting
• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Ability to establish a holistic team with the combined requirements for the project, across different geographies and well coordinated

Open and professional / friendly / knowledgable engagement with the senior staff taking responsibility 

Are there any areas for improvement or something FCamara could have done differently?

No. We were very happy with the work undertaken.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm the technical lead of geospatial at a Microsoft Azure cloud services provider. We offer a geospatial web portal that helps customers understand their market. Our portal presents customers with data from their stores that they can dive into and receive feedback from our system. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with FCamara?

We were looking for assistance from a DevOps specialist as we suspected our environment wasn't set up optimally. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We hired Raphael (CEO at FCamara UK) as a contractor from FCamara. Raphael helped us in an Azure DevOps capacity. He monitored all of our products and helped us make better decisions regarding technology and hardware choices. He also helped us define scaling roads to improve our service. 

After this initial project, we noticed Raphael also had a strong programming skill set. While continuing in his original role, we extended his brief to work on other development tasks, including diagnosing and fixing memory leaks. He also helped us modify APIs to use asynchronous reply request patterns and refactored problematic areas of the code base to be more solid, following best practices. 

Generally, Raphael helped us identify bottlenecks or slow behavior in our system and implement appropriate fixes. Most of the work included making the infrastructure work better and running well. Our entire platform was hosted in Microsoft Azure, and the frontend used Angular. The backend is a C## web services backend. 

Additionally, FCamara provided consultancy regarding UI design and created wireframes to suggest ways in which our interface could be improved to make it easier for our users. We onboarded some of their suggestions. 

What is the team composition?

Initially, we only worked with Raphael, who had access to our code base and joined our technical meetings. Additionally, 2–3 teammates worked on our UI review. 

How much have you invested with them?

We spent around £20,000 (approximately $26,000 USD).

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked with FCamara from April 2021–January 2024. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

One of the project's key successes was that FCamara suggested moving our caching from block storage to Redis, an offering highly optimized for quick data retrieval, significantly improving the speed at which our data was retrieved. FCamara's suggestions resulted in a snappier setup that better served our customers, and we also managed to trim down unnecessary costs. We had a successful partnership and welcome the chance to work with FCamara again should the opportunity arise.

How did FCamara perform from a project management standpoint?

Raphael was our single point of contact, which was helpful. He reported to me and our CTO directly. His projects were managed via our Agile processes using YouTrack, a project management web platform, and he could adapt and follow our internal project management.

Raphael worked under monthly sprints, and after completing each task, we moved to the next sprint. Raphael then presented his findings to a broader development team through monthly updates. We collaborated through GitHub to store the code base.
Are there any employees from the service provider's team that you would like to give a shout-out to in this review?

Raphael was very driven and intelligent. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

What was particularly good about FCamara was Raphael, who was very intelligent, high energy, and had great ideas. We initially hired the team as a DevOps specialist, and they ended up diving into our code base and working with our technical team to bring their ideas to reality. FCamara didn't just make suggestions and then walk away; they were willing to take action on those ideas and follow them through to completion.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I can't think of anything FCamara could improve off the top of my head. 

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

I suggest having a well-defined scope when engaging with FCamara. Our deliverables were clear, and if you have this, you shouldn't have any problem at all.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Ipsos is a research company present in around 90 countries around the world. I'm the IT director for Latin America, so I'm responsible for our development team in that region.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with FCamara?

We needed to develop a custom system using AI technology to increase our efficiency. We defined the processes on which we could implement this solution, but we required help building the custom system.

As a research company, we obviously do a lot of research. The objective of the research is to understand people's ideas and opinions about certain products. It's common that our interviews include open questions, so we have a team at Ipsos that reads all the answers and tries to create topics and insights around all those different opinions.

We have companies that gather around 2,000 interviews per month, so it would be impossible for customers to read all the different opinions from those interviewees. Therefore, our main goal is to create accurate insights so that customers can get a general idea of what others think about those products. For this project, we wanted to leverage AI technology to create a solution that summarized all those opinions automatically.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

For our most recent project, we hired FCamara to help us develop our AI-based system. Their team has trained AI technology to summarize texts from our research interviews and automatically create insights. FCamara has used ChatGPT API integration to create this system. However, the actual automation process of creating the summaries was developed from scratch by their team.

What is the team composition?

We've worked with around 15 teammates from FCamara overall. For this specific project, we've worked with five teammates.

How did you come to work with FCamara?

We've been working with FCamara for over 10 years on multiple projects. Originally, a former partner brought them to work with us.

What is the status of this engagement?

We've been working with FCamara since around 2014, and our engagement is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Thanks to this solution, our team is now in charge of reviewing the generated summaries and insights and not doing the actual job of reading all the interviews and creating topics manually. Therefore, this system has helped us improve our processes' efficiency, helping us save time and money and allowing us to deliver results faster than before.

According to our KPIs, we've increased our performance by 70% since implementing this solution, which is a very big win for us. Initially, we expected less performance improvement of around 40%–50%. However, using AI has shown great results. We're very satisfied with these results thus far, and we're now working on improving the tool by automating other activities in order to enhance our efficiency even more.

How did FCamara perform from a project management standpoint?

Although FCamara's communication has been very important for the project, their ability to understand our needs and use technology to create solutions has been outstanding. They've worked with us to understand our needs and together look for the best solution. Still, their communication and budget management have also been an important part of our successful project.

We use Jira to manage all the technical aspects of the project. As for communication, we use Microsoft Teams. We also follow an agile project management style, which includes daily scrum meetings to follow up on the project and understand the pain points.

What did you find most impressive about them?

FCamara's technical expertise has been a key factor in the success of our project. As mentioned, we're a research company, so we have our own technical team. However, AI development isn't our area of expertise. Once we explained the problem we wanted to address, their team was able to help us very quickly, demonstrating that expertise.

Additionally, one of the most important skills is their close collaboration with their clients. They work very closely with us to understand our needs and stay with us through good and bad moments. They don't simply try to sell technology solutions.

For example, whenever we discuss solutions, we start with an MVP and discuss the project budget. They always care about how they can help us, which is a big differentiator from other service providers.

Are there any areas they could improve?

In these types of projects, there are always things that can be improved. However, I can't think of anything specific on which FCamara could improve.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

FCamara is a service provider that will understand your needs and, after entering a project with you, will show a strong compromise to deliver what they agree on in the contract. They're very responsible about delivering, and if you have any issues after delivery, they'll support you. As an example, I've received a lot of support from them during this year.

When working with other service providers, you could be talking with one person one day and with another person the next day. Usually, when changing contact points, they might not have the full context, or they might not understand your company. If you decide to work with FCamara, be sure that the person you'll work with will know your company, make you their priority, and support your needs.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Project manager of a financial services company 

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Financial institution providing bank processing services

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire FCamara to accomplish?

• Project delivery

SOLUTION

How did you find FCamara?

Referral

Why did you select FCamara over others?

• Pricing fit our budget
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from FCamara were assigned to this project?

6-10 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

• API development for new financial application.
• Delivery divided into regulatory milestones

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Delivery of artifacts according to the planned schedule

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

The team worked in a Scrum model, and the backlog was met according to the production capacity. Providers take activities and give real estimates

What was your primary form of communication with FCamara?

Virtual Meeting

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Providing resources with the necessary skills to act in a short time at a reasonable price

Are there any areas for improvement or something FCamara could have done differently?

nope

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Technology analyst of RNI

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

RNI is a real estate construction company focused on the residential segment

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire FCamara to accomplish?

• IT infrastructure
• Business agility
• Azure and Microsoft 365
• Security
• operational efficiency

SOLUTION

How did you find FCamara?

Referral

Why did you select FCamara over others?

• Pricing fit our budget
• Good value for cost
• easy relationship

How many teammates from FCamara were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

• Migration of email accounts and domain between Microsoft tenants. 
• Domain segregation and network infrastructure.
• Creation of new Microsoft Azure tenant and migration of resources between tenants.
• Improvement in the network and cloud security scenario.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Gains and improvements:

• reduced expenses with Microsoft
• better operational efficiency
• increase in agility
• infrastructure modernization
• deactivation of local servers

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

All deliveries were on time and successful

What was your primary form of communication with FCamara?

Virtual Meeting

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

We were impressed with their ease of communication, partnership, and dedication to the project

Are there any areas for improvement or something FCamara could have done differently?

Probably not, I have no complaints