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Success Story

Daffodil helps mercaDolar to build a currency exchange platform to combat the rising inflation in the Venezuela market

Services Used:

Fintech Solutions
App Development
DevOps

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mercaDolar is a US-based fintech company that provides an exchange platform for the hyper-inflated Venezuelan market. Venezuela has been facing hyperinflation due to the social-economic and political crisis in the country that started in 2016. With the inflation rate rising to 53,798,500% from 2016 to 2019. The Venezuelan people needed a solution to exchange their unstable currency (Venezuelan Bolivar) for a stable one (USD). mercaDolar’s aim is to provide the restricted Venezuelan exchange market a safe and secure platform to conduct exchange transactions.

  • 600 hours of development effort saved
  • 5x faster release cycle
  • 25% cost optimization for feature releases
  • 74% reduction in deployment time

Business Requirements

The Venezuelan currency market has many legal restrictions and a complex multi-layered exchange rate system that offers different exchange rates to different people depending on the purpose. There is limited transparency provided to the citizens by the Venezuelan government to conduct exchange transactions. Due to such strict restrictions, the black market has been playing a major role in the currency exchange process in the country resulting in an increase in fraudulent transactions. mercaDolar intended to provide a legal and fraud-free currency exchange platform to users from not just Venezuela but all around the world through which they could purchase or sell currencies. They also wanted to provide a secure in-built digital wallet service for users to store multiple currencies, transfer funds and request payments.

mercaDolar was on the lookout for a technology partner who could help them transform their technological aspiration into a viable and market-ready solution. After a rigorous screening of market leaders in the technology space, they selected Daffodil Software. Our team of top-tier technology experts and astounding experience in the fintech industry gave them the confidence to trust us with the development of the project. The major challenges that team Daffodil had to face during the engagement were:

  • To build secure and scalable web and mobile applications for currency management that enable the users to exchange their Venezuelan bolívar for USD. Security was to be a crucial aspect of user experience and interface design, more so for a fintech application. Hence, it was important to incorporate all security measures and compliances such as the PCI DSS while building the applications.
  • To build a digital wallet using technologies that are hard to decrypt and hence, ensure data security as the foremost priority. The wallet had to have a functionality to ‘add funds’ through transfers from the user’s bank account in the US or ‘transfer funds’ from other MercaDolar users.
  • To enable third-party payments by adding ‘request payments’ functionality to the wallet, which allows users to make payment requests to third parties and make pending payments by registering on mercaDolar.

The Solution

To begin with the engagement, our team of expert business analysts first tried to meticulously understand the client’s requirement. Then with our deep technology expertise and the understanding of strategic priorities, we enabled effective project mapping. A comprehensive project roadmap was created. A web application and native mobile apps were developed which enabled the sale and purchase of US dollars in exchange for Venezuelan Bolivars. The application provided offline payment processing within 2 hours.

Daffodil used the DevOps strategy and implemented the Continous Implementation / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) feature which made the release cycle 5 times faster and helped reduce the mean-time-to-deployment (MTTD). This strategy allowed more time to be allocated for testing and quality assurance and hence, saved on development time and optimized project cost.

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The server-side of the cross-platform web application was built using the ASP.NET Core. Due to its optimized code, and newer upgrades the technology helped develop a high-performing application. Apart from that, Angular7 was used for front-end development which resulted in faster development and enhanced application performance due to its upgraded features such as the compatibility compiler, CLI prompt, and improved accessibility for native select elements.

The application includes a digital wallet called the MercaDolar wallet, that can be used by buyers and sellers for storing funds. The MercaDolar wallet could be connected with the user’s bank account and they could add, send and receive funds through it. The wallet was equipped with a strong authentication mechanism, allows for face recognition, fingerprints, and secure passwords.

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A few additional features that were responsible for the success of the web application were:

Automatic Currency Exchange Software: The application was integrated with an automatic currency exchange software that enabled the user to set a rate that they were willing to sell or buy the currency for and if an offer matching the set rate is made the user is notified automatically about the same.

Financial Integrations: The application was seamlessly integrated with accounting programs, payment gateways, POS systems, and other standard applications to ensure smooth transactions.

Cloud-Based Application: The web application development project was led by a team of seven developers, quality analyst, and a DevOps engineer. CI/CD pipeline was implemented to ensure a faster-time-to-market. Microsoft Azure cloud platform and its app service were used to deploy the application. The efficiency and cost of the application were kept in consideration by leveraging on the static website hosting feature of the Azure cloud storage.

Database: The AWS DynamoDB was used as the key-value and document database to support the workload of the applications as it provides consistent, single-digit millisecond response times at any scale.

Performance Monitoring: Azure’s Application Insight service was used to monitor the live web application, it helped in automatically detecting performance anomalies that help to improve the performance and usability of the application. It also provided powerful analytics tools that helped diagnose issues to increase the understanding of the web application.

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The Impact

The technical leadership displayed by our team of experts while defining the project architecture, including infrastructure capabilities, data architecture, and design has helped mercaDolar develop an innovative, secure, scalable and high-performing currency management system, ensuring smooth delivery and reduced time-to-market. Daffodil was instrumental in setting up a strong foundation for the product’s technological capabilities through proactive identification and implementation of relevant technologies and expertise. The end result was a safe, efficient, and successful currency exchange platform with an in-built digital wallet which helped the users conduct currency transactions not just in Venezuela but around the world. The project had a 5X faster release cycle and 25% of cost-optimized due to the effective use of DevOps approach.

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  • 600 hours of development effort saved
  • 5x faster release cycle
  • 25% cost optimization for feature releases
  • 74% reduction in deployment time

 

“We came to Daffodil searching for a software development solution with an efficient team. I must say, we found more than our expectations. We found great quality software delivery. Thank you so much, Daffodil.”

HUGO PADILLA, CEO,
MERCADOLAR

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