Scalability & Stabilization.

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 DEGIRO is facing is the increased number of phishing attacks: “We have 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, for example, in March 2020, when many people wanted to become customers at the same time. Scaling up and stabilizing had to be done quickly, but with respect for security and usability, for this we used Kubernetes.

Scalability, one of the benchmarks of RockSOLID software, has been the motto for our IT Rockstars at DEGIRO from day one. Setting up services that are themselves responsible for the domain is key to this, but so is stateless call handling. They then 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 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. After all, how the codes are developed is not yet cloud ready. Customer security plays a role here, but so do costs. 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 working methods, they have worked the “waterfall way” several times in the past. A big difference with agile working, which they now use, is that they have business-focused squads. “Some are about reports and reconciliation, some are about taxes and some are just about trader”. So precisely business-focused 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. By now there is already a large team of IT Rockstars to support this.

Where business and IT meet and DEGIRO ensures the values of reliability, user-friendly 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 criminals.

At the same time, you then make it more difficult for customers 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.