alienlab

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the founder of fintech startup Currencii.eu. Currencii.eu is an online platform for exchanging foreign currency to local money and vice versa.

Currency exchange is very expensive, the cost of currency exchange can vary from 2% up to 5% of an invoice (depending on the currency and amount). In addition, legal entities and individuals spend up to 1 hour on negotiation with banks to buy a currency at the best rate.

For what projects/services did your company hire alienlab?

We have hired Alienlab for the full development of the platform including front end and back end. The wear responsible to fully manage the project starting from choosing the tech stack and ending with the implementation of the project.

What were your goals for this project?

The goal of the project was to create a web application that will allow our customer to receive currency exchange service fully online.

How did you select this vendor?

Being an Estonian startup and having experience in working with tech companies all over the world we are very well connected to tech communities and as a result, the selection of the vendor was very competitive.

We have selected them after thorough consideration with the team for the following reasons. They wear very enthusiastic right from the beginning and provided excellent suggestions on how to move this startup from the prototype stage to fully functioning web application.

Overall Alienlab provided us with the best price/quality ratio, which was important for us at a time.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Overall, the tool consists of two main sections: Calculator and My Exchanges. In order to request a currency exchange, the registered user has to log in to the Currencii system and go through a four-step procedure.

1. First, depending on whether the user needs to sell or buy currency, an amount is provided along with the type of currency. The user also needs to select the opposite type of currency, the amount will be converted to the desired currency.
2. In the next step, the user selects a bank account where the converted funds will be transferred to.
3. The third step presupposes confirmation of the detailed data, provided by the system.
4. At step 4 the user receives instructions regarding further steps on how to transfer funds that need to be converted. After the funds are transferred to Currencii platform, the user will receive converted funds on his account.

The second main section of the Currencii platform is the My exchanges section, which is a list of pending and historical transactions completed on the platform.

Pending transactions are those that has been initiated by the user but hasn’t yet been processed by the platform. Historical transactions are the once that has been completed, in other words, the funds have been converted and sent to the user.

What was the team composition?

The company was fully involved in the project as the project was very big and require a full concentration of the team. The project started in August 2018 and ended 2019 March.

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

The implementation of the project was very smooth and effective for our company. Being a small startup we did not have the resources as many other big companies have.

Alienlab was very organized in what they do and delivered the product on time, did not ask unnecessary questions and did not absorb our time. That helped us to dedicate more time and focus on the development of business and serve customers.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

We had a dedicated person in the company that was responsible for communicating our requirements for Alinelab. That proved to be very effective as one person was responsible for the whole process of collecting business requirements, prioritizing them and sending to the vendor.

To our delight, alienlab has successfully replaced a full-time programming team without compromising on the quality of work.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Being a FinTech Startup our risks are mostly connected to cyber attacks. Together with the Alienlab we have to spend a lot of time to make sure that the platform complies with the current regulation and best practice of security and safety.

We ensure that all of the processed designed by our team are reliable. The team solved this issue with a professional attitude towards what is important for our company and dedicated significant time to research the best possible solutions to prevent hacker attacks.

Are there any areas for improvement?

We are going to hire them again for the next stage of development of our product. :)