South African fintech meets infrastructure challenges with Microsoft solutions

Allegiance Consulting (Pty) Ltd started as a company consisting of legal and business consultants specialising in complex financial planning in the South African market. They started doing business on March 1, 1999. They have since leveraged the experience and knowledge of their financial engineering team, and added insanely talented developers, quants, and UX specialists to the mix to build the advanced financial planning systems they are building today.

When the COVID-19 health crisis struck, clients were uncertain and scared about the future. Moreover, they had to quickly get accustomed to working from home. Allegiance Consulting faced these new challenges quickly, proactively, and successfully, thanks to Microsoft solutions—including a highly secure and scalable infrastructure.

Challenge 1: Develop applications ‘in the blink of an eye’ on highly secure, scalable infrastructure

“We had to move quickly to reassure our clients, and allow business continuity,” explains Kobus Barnard, CEO at Allegiance Consulting. “We immediately developed an engagement application for one of our large clients using Blazor technology from Microsoft. From inception to release in production, we successfully conceived, designed, and developed an application that allowed the organization to connect directly with its clients. The application is a diagnostic tool that provides guidance and tips on how to deal with the health crisis financially and while staying safe. The learning curve was steep, but that was one solution where we used Microsoft technologies.”

It was a risk developing in Blazor, which was a new technology, but the gamble paid off—the application was a resounding success. According to Barnard, the company deployed the application on Microsoft Azure, “which gave us the scalability and security needed for an enterprise-level application in the financial services sector.”

To figure out security in accessing its infrastructure, the company had an excellent opportunity to spin up a point-to-site virtual private network in the Azure infrastructure space. “We were able to lock all of these dependencies behind the network itself, and that ensured that we could safely and very securely connect to Azure instances without prying eyes being able to also connect to them,” he says.

Solution 1: Move from private cloud to Azure and reach out to international markets with flexibility, power, and stability

Allegiance serves clients with a financial advice platform called Avalon. The company hosted a private cloud for more than 10 years, and in 2019, it moved to Azure local infrastructure. “Azure immediately catapulted us to have access to the required enterprise-level cloud solutions, especially from our banking clients,” explains Barnard. Immediate benefits of using software as a service (SaaS) solutions were savings on infrastructure costs, and the ability to scale applications up or down at any given point in time. “We have recently gone over to the MCA agreement, which has given us the opportunity to use reserved instances for further cost savings. It has enabled us to use infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and incorporate that into our SaaS solution. This affords a relatively small company the ability to scale at will with flexible solutions. We’re also using Azure Service Fabric, which has made a massive impact in the way our technology is perceived within the market.”

Barnard notes, “It also provides a foundation to start reaching out to international markets with the flexibility, power, stability, and reliability that is currently experienced with our Azure platform.”

Challenge 2: Stay connected and collaborate with colleagues and clients

“Another challenge was that we needed to remain connected to our team and the customers during this time. We serve five of the largest banks and life companies in South Africa. We were under severe pressure to keep the rhythm and the delivery of the projects going.

To safely adhere to lockdown regulations, the company also needed to ensure that its entire staff of 37 people were able to connect internally over a highly secure platform, as well as connect and collaborate with clients. “It was new, and it was scary,” says Barnard.

Solution 2: Work anywhere, faster, and more securely

Allegiance was already using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), so it was easy to make sure the company remained available to its customers using traditional channels. “We decided that Microsoft Teams is the way to go forward in terms of meetings, since most of our affiliates and partners are also using Microsoft applications. It was the obvious choice for communication, and it really fills the gap of physical presence. We’ve looked at other applications such as Microsoft Kaizala, but at this point have not implemented it yet, because Teams gives us all that we require. After almost a year, we’re still using Teams as our main platform to connect with clients, run projects, and run stand-ups. A face-to-face meeting now is the absolute exception to the rule.”

“Another concern,” muses Barnard, “was how do you maintain a culture, or successfully onboard new team members—how do you impart your culture and values virtually? That remains a challenge. Our best guestimate is that we will not go back to a pre-2020 way of operation. Allegiance will embrace and adopt a hybrid approach, where sometimes we will create events for employees to connect face to face. But the hybrid model for distributed employees, working from home, is on our minds in the future. We had concerns about productivity, especially with young members of the team.”

Impact: Increased productivity, better financial decisions—and longer hours

“We did not know what to expect, and we were surprised that productivity increased. Allegiance’s massive transformative purpose is better financial decisions. Most of our team members are obsessed with what we’re building, and how we’re making a difference in the world. The working hours are much longer than expected. And now, one of the company’s goals is to aggressively manage project schedules to ensure that family life does not suffer under this new digital normal. We now must actively plan and figure out how to solve that problem.”

Next steps: Automate infrastructure

“Our next steps? Automate our infrastructure layer that is hosted on Azure,” says Barnard. “We want to ensure that we can spin up new environments without human interaction, so we can deploy on a continuous basis using Azure DevOps as our base pipeline layer. We are also currently at IoT devices on the edge for enhanced security using FIDO keys and AI to further enhance the user experience on our SaaS applications.”

Barnard concludes, “Why do we do all this? To help the world make better financial decisions. People deserve the chance to reach their goals and live the life of their dreams. Microsoft technologies help us to do just that.”