Custom Software Development for Financial Services Co
Featured Review- Custom Software Development
- Confidential
- Aug. 2024 - Ongoing
- Quality
- 5.0
- Schedule
- 5.0
- Cost
- 5.0
- Willing to Refer
- 5.0
"The team is accommodating and always looks for a solution to help deliver the best outcome for customers."
- Financial services
- United Kingdom
- 201-500 Employees
- Online Review
- Verified
Accedia has developed a custom software solution for a financial services company. The team has worked on multiple of the client's projects.
Accedia has delivered bug-free solutions on time and within budget. The team is efficient and flexible when requirements change, communicating via virtual meetings, email, and messaging apps. Their friendliness, supportiveness, proactiveness, and knowledge are impressive. This review is an update by the client company. The original content is located below the new review.
The client submitted this review online.
BACKGROUND
Please describe your company and position.
I am the Product Manager of Castle Trust Bank
Describe what your company does in a single sentence.
CastleTrust Bank provides services in specialised mortgages, savings and retail financing.
OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE
What specific goals or objectives did you hire Accedia to accomplish?
- Software development
- Project management
I've been working with Accedia since I joined in September 2022 as a Product Manager.
SOLUTION
How did you find Accedia?
Inherited through acquisition
Why did you select Accedia over others?
- High ratings
- Pricing fit our budget
- Great culture fit
- Good value for cost
- Referred to me
How many teammates from Accedia were assigned to this project?
2-5 Employees
Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.
It's not a project as such as Accedia have been with CTB for a few years (over 7) delivering software solutions by delivering different projects and the work is ongoing. Since then we have successfully delivered multiple projects on time and within the budget agreed.
RESULTS & FEEDBACK
What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?
Successful, timely delivery of projects, bug free code. Pro-active participation at project initiation and through the projects. Accedia team is instrumental in delivering multiple projects across Omni business. They take a change from Discovery through to a production release.
The team is efficient, always sticks to the original timelines unless there are changes in the requirements. Where the changes occur when a project is in progress, the team is accommodating and always looks for a solution to help deliver the best outcome for customers.
Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?
Always on time, within the agreed timelines but always accommodating for any change in requirements or direction in general.
What was your primary form of communication with Accedia?
- Virtual Meeting
- Email or Messaging App
What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?
Very efficient, accommodating, friendly, supportive, proactive, very knowlegeable stuff.
Are there any areas for improvement or something Accedia could have done differently?
n/a
UPDATED REVIEW
This review was published on August 13, 2024.
Project Manager, Retail Finance CompanyFinancial services
London, United Kingdom
201-500 Employees
Jan 2016 - Ongoing
$1,000,000 to $9,999,999
Verified
Project summary
Accedia supplemented the development team of a retail finance company to provide spot improvements and bug fixes to their retail orginations platform. They are currently working to migrate to an MVC framework
Feedback summary
The team has successfully delivered all of the product functionality they have been tasked with and has increased their capacity and velocity over the years of their partnership. Accedia communicates very frequently through Slack, helping the teams to function as one effective unit.
BACKGROUND
Introduce your business and what you do there.
I am a product manager for a retail finance company under a larger parent organization.
OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE
What challenge were you trying to address with Accedia?
We needed to expand our development resource base for some work on a product that we were conducting. The work itself was relatively small, so we decided we wanted to bring in a team rather than hire in-house for the project.
SOLUTION
What was the scope of their involvement?
They supplemented our development team in making limited changes as needed throughout an iterative process as we evaluated our customers’ interests and needs for our product. The product itself is a retail originations platform that’s built in Web Forms, which is a legacy stack that comes with a number of technological limitations.
We are moving towards an MVC framework with them, although we are taking one step at a time throughout the process. They helped with that migration, primarily in terms of functionality but with some elements of design as well.
What is the team composition?
We started out working with a team of ten, and we reduced that down to about 4–5 at the beginning of 2019.
How did you come to work with Accedia?
I wasn’t involved in the selection process that led us to our team, but they have been our development partner for quite a while now.
How much have you invested with them?
We’ve spent over $1,000,000 with them over our years of working together.
What is the status of this engagement?
Our work with them started around January 2016 and is still ongoing in a mostly maintenance occasional upgrade capacity.
RESULTS & FEEDBACK
What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?
The main success metrics were the delivery of the projects they’ve worked on for us. Everything we’ve built together has been released and remains in the ecosystem of our products. All of their work has been done with a purpose and supported the core of our business, which has helped them to become a real part of the culture of our organization.
From a metrics perspective, the velocity of the team and the amount that we are able to achieve has very much improved over the course of our engagement together. The fact that we were able to bring them into our day to day operations as well as we have is a testament to the strength of the relationship between our companies.
How did Accedia perform from a project management standpoint?
We handle the project management aspects of the project almost completely. From my perspective, however, they did a good job of sticking to the deadlines that we laid out for them and making sure that we stayed on track toward all deliverables.
The teams communicate primarily over Slack, either voice and video call or messaging about anything that needs to be discussed in the process of the day-to-day. We had a very set regime in terms of our agile approach to the delivery, so there were regular weekly standups and every-other-week retrospectives. They did a great job of being totally open and communicative throughout all of those processes.
What did you find most impressive about them?
Their ability to learn and adapt is consistently one of the most impressive aspects of our work with them. Flexibility is an often-overlooked quality in outsourced vendors, I think, but Accedia was able to adapt to the needs of our business in all regards, whether culturally, strategically, or procedurally.
They were able to strike a really good balance between following our instructions and challenging the reasons why we made various decisions in order to help make the product the best it could be. Fairly early on into our relationship, there wasn’t much difference between the two teams because of their ability to work within the unit almost seamlessly.
Are there any areas they could improve?
I think that they could challenge ideas a little bit more in the early stages of their projects. There is certainly an aspect in which the people you’re working with are your clients and the customer is always right, but at the end of the day you’re building software, and that has to be a joint effort. We developed that level of collaboration over time but having it even earlier could have helped us get up to speed more quickly.
Do you have any advice for potential customers?
Regardless of who has more knowledge of the history of the project at the beginning, you need to make sure that those people have the expertise to take the lead in supporting the new people coming on board. You also have to make sure that those joining the project are gaining the knowledge and skills that they need in order to be successful in their roles.
STAR RATINGS
Overall rating: 5
Quality: 4
Cost: 3
Schedule: 4
Willing to refer: 5
RATINGS
-
Quality
5.0Service & Deliverables
-
Schedule
5.0On time / deadlines
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Cost
5.0Value / within estimates
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Willing to Refer
5.0NPS