Impact
20-30% faster time to market
Deployment Wizard
Quality improvement
Better customer experience
Full transparency
Developer happiness
About
With 3.3 million client accounts in 16 countries and over 63 million trades per year, flatexDEGIRO is a powerhouse in the European brokerage market. Since the merger in 2020, the company processes some €300 billion in trading volume annually. Growth continues unabated in 2025: +14% in new accounts, +19% in transaction volume.
But growth requires stability. “If your price information is minutes behind, that directly affects the customer,” says Mark Bertels, Lead Architect at flatexDEGIRO. Time is money.
Through the merger, the company wants to exploit economies of scale. One trading server, one contract with parties like Nasdaq or Euronext. Less maintenance, less cost, more speed. But then systems and people have to be attuned to each other. Without good integration, friction, delays and frustration arise.
“Without the Internal Developer Platform, we wouldn’t even dare touch certain components. Now we are modernizing at a pace that was impossible before.”
TWO TECH STACKS. DOZENS OF HABITS. ONE DEADLINE.
A merger goes beyond technology. It also means bringing together different work cultures, systems, jargons and compliance requirements. “You’re under a magnifying glass. One mistake and you pay the price,” Mark said.
While the technical migration was still ongoing, business requests kept pouring in. New features, more pressure, shorter deadlines. But with unclear ownership, two tech landscapes and a laborious production process, teams were getting bogged down. “It was a drag to go to production,” says Mark.
The question to Team Rockstars was seemingly simple: make it easier. Erik Leonard, Product Owner and Rockstar explains: “The trick then is to uncover the deeper questions underneath in a short period of time.” How do developers regain visibility:
- Where do which systems run?
- Who owns which component?
- What APIs are active?
- And how do we ensure oversight and cooperation?
Erik began by listening and observing. Not building directly, but first understanding how people think, collaborate and communicate within the different contexts of flatex and DEGIRO.
GRIP, SPEED AND OVERVIEW IN ONE PLATFORM: HOW AN IDP EMPOWERS DEVELOPERS
The solution became HubIT: an Internal Developer Platform that brings overview, speed and collaboration. Within eight months, an MVP was in place. “The delivery was as promised on the birthday of Stephan Heinze (ed. Executive Director Enterprise Architecture, flatexDEGIRO),” Erik says with a smile. “The choice of a central, transparent catalog as MVP was very deliberate,” he continues. “This allowed us to create support. Not a mandatory system, but an attractive alternative that bets on developer self-service.”
Why open source?
Erik explains that with the platform team at flatexDEGIRO, after a thorough pros and cons analysis of multiple solutions, they chose the open-source Spotify Backstage framework. “We were able to start small without high licensing costs,” Mark said. HubIT runs entirely on-premises and the GitOps integration ties into existing workflows. Backstage has a sizable GitLab community with FinOps experience. The team has also sought knowledge sharing with other Fintech companies.
Benefits:
- Component catalog with metadata
- Scaffolding with reusable templates
- Full transparency about components, dependencies and ownership
The stack: Jenkins, ArgoCD, Kubernetes, Nexus, Grafana, Matomo, Jira, Confluence, mkdocs + TechDocs.
In doing so, Erik fulfilled multiple roles: Product Owner, Scrum Master and Team Lead of a multidisciplinary team. He designed the concept, built a roadmap, involved stakeholders and gave the platform an identity, with a name and logo that connects culture (orange + blue = green).
The gamechanger? The Deployment Wizard.
Where deployments previously took days or weeks, they now happen in minutes. Everything is standardized and error-free thanks to a full-service scaffolder. “You simply cannot go to production if everything is not defined,” Mark said.
The Rockstar also ensured internal support through demo sessions, feedback loops and developer engagement. This iterative approach strengthened adoption and ownership among teams.
About the turnaround time, Mark says, “It is truly remarkable how in such a short time, based on a relatively open customer request, in this complex environment with attention to support, we worked from Proof of Concept to MVP!”
FROM DRAGON TO DREAM: WHY DEVELOPERS THEMSELVES CHOOSE HUBIT
HubIT’s impact transcends technology. It touches culture, trust and collaboration. Developers voluntarily choose the platform because it actually makes their jobs easier.
Results at a glance:
- 20-30% faster time to market: through standardization and self-service
- Better customer experience: feature requests are implemented faster
- Deployment Wizard: flawless releases in minutes instead of days/weeks
- Quality improvement: by identifying configuration problems early, downtime does not have a chance
- Transparency about running systems, ownership and dependencies
- Growing adoption: increase in registered components and APIs in the catalog
- Capacity gains: faster scaling of services, room for innovation and space in data centers (such as for AI)
- Developer happiness: less frustration, less duplication, stable production
- Faster onboarding: of new developers
“Without HubIT, we wouldn’t even dare touch certain components,” Mark says. “Now we’re scaling down and expanding at a rate that was impossible before.”
In addition, HubIT enables cost optimization: contracts with external parties can be strategically scaled up or down, which can save millions. And because the platform also provides insight during meetings with the Software Technical Advisory Board, the gap between tech and business has narrowed.
Collaboration
“Confidence is crucial,” says Mark. “And with Team Rockstars, that’s always a good thing.”
The collaboration was based on trust, professionalism and ownership. Instead of steering by hours, Team Rockstars steered by impact. Erik explains: “We look at people’s capabilities internally and then get the most out of the team. This is how we work together toward results.” By starting small and allowing room for experimentation, a strongly supported solution emerged.
Mark Bertels concludes with: “They are professionals in the best sense of the word. Team Rockstars stays at the forefront of training, always learning, always thinking along.” He emphasizes, “That’s not a given. I sometimes miss that with other players.”
With HubIT, flatexDEGIRO not only built a powerful Internal Developer Platform, but also laid the foundation for a mature Platform Engineering culture. With transparency, ownership and collaboration as pillars. A future-proof foundation built on people and technology.
“Confidence is crucial. At Team Rockstars, that’s always a good thing.”
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