Scalability & Stabilization.

Results

From Smarter cyber criminals

and more customer demand

To defense strategy

With security solutions

From high peaks

who provide many requests

To calm waters

Through scalability of systems

DEGIRO was founded in 2013 with the goal of making investing accessible to all. DEGIRO now operates in 18 European countries. Especially during DEGIRO’s early years, IT was at the forefront of the business: IT was leading, followed by rapid expansion based on business objectives.

According to Andreas Holmberg, CTO of DEGIRO: “If you want to have a unique selling point, you have to build more yourself. So the main advantage of customization is that your service to customers is unique.”

Challenge

BUILD MORE YOURSELF FOR A UNIQUE SERVICE

User-friendliness plays a major role within DEGIRO’s business model, as well as mobile first: 80% of its clients primarily use a mobile device to trade.

A related challenge facing DEGIRO is the increased number of phishing attacks: “We’ve seen a lot of fake sites that look like DEGIRO sites, but have nothing to do with DEGIRO.” This challenges DEGIRO to combine security and usability. This was also put to the test in March 2020, for example, when many people wanted to become customers at the same time. Scaling and stabilization had to be done quickly, but with consideration for security and usability, for this we used Kubernetes.

Solution

Scalability

Scalability has been the motto for our IT Rockstars at DEGIRO from day one. Setting up services that are themselves responsible for the domain is most important in this regard, but stateless call handling is also involved. Then they decoupled the code with microservices to make it scalable again.

IT rockstar Mark Bertels says the following about it: “By making the different services cloud-agnostic, it doesn’t matter which cloud it runs in. We are really a Java house, but we have links. So to the purse and we used C++”.

Andreas does not see the use of Java and C++ changing anytime soon, at most that they will use more .NET around CRM in the future.

PUBLIC CLOUD CAN ALSO HELP IN THAT SCALING.

Whether DEGIRO will consider that? For now, they do sit in their private cloud, but on-premises. In fact, how the codes are developed is not yet cloud ready. This involves customer safety as well as cost. The plan is to spend the next two years trying to make everything cloud ready, “staying cloud agnostic is really key here,” Mark states. Whether they then move to the public cloud next, time will tell.

WATERFALL VS AGILE

In terms of methods, the “waterfall way” has been used several times in the past. A big difference with agile working, which is what they are using now, is that they have business-focused squads. “Some are about reporting and reconciliation, some are about taxes and some are just about trader.” So precisely business-oriented work within IT.

According to Andreas, this has helped us work even better as one team. Not department by department, but rather business and IT together. Meanwhile, a large team of IT Rockstars is already in place to support it.

result

guard against missteps by cybercriminals

Where business and IT come together and DEGIRO guarantees the values of reliability, user-friendliness and security, DEGIRO uses a mobile interface to scan your passport, for example, to quickly become a customer. For security, two-factor authentication is used to make it more difficult for the criminals.

At the same time, you then make it more difficult for the customer to log in because they have to follow multiple steps. But the criminals are getting smarter and smarter, so DEGIRO has to, to make sure customers are safe.