Bitpanda: Digital Onboarding Transformation and Migration to a Microservices Architecture
Bitpanda, founded in 2014 in Austria, has rapidly grown into one of Europe’s leading fintech platforms, serving over 3 million users with a team of more than 600 people across multiple international hubs. To support its ambitious goal of expanding to over 30 million customers, Bitpanda needed to evolve its entire user onboarding system: modernize registration and login flows, improve data acquisition for analytics and marketing, and transition from a monolithic PHP backend to a modular microservices architecture capable of handling high traffic.
This technological transformation was critical to providing the reliability, scalability and flexibility expected from a global financial platform.
The main challenge was operating within a highly complex environment involving more than 300 developers across numerous teams. The legacy platform relied on a PHP monolith, lacked robust automated QA, and had a rigid onboarding system unable to adapt to different regulatory and market requirements. Our mission was to modernize the architecture, implement a flexible and modular onboarding experience, integrate AB Testing, establish advanced analytics, and significantly improve code reliability with automated QA—all while ensuring continuous operation of a financial platform serving millions of customers.
Transforming Bitpanda’s Digital Onboarding Experience
Bitpanda aimed to prepare its platform for a new generation of users, as well as for white-label solutions. We developed a fully modular and flexible onboarding webapp that adapts to different countries, regulations and customer types.
We also implemented reliable systems for analytics and marketing data acquisition, integrated AB Testing to optimize user journeys, and initiated a broad migration from the legacy PHP monolith toward a modern microservices-based architecture.
A crucial part of the project was introducing a solid automated QA workflow. When we joined, the company relied heavily on manual QA and a centralized automation process. We implemented team-level automated QA, enabling deeper checks and greater reliability before merging code into the main branch.
We also fully refactored the onboarding process in the Android and iOS apps, migrating to a modular architecture aligned with Bitpanda’s long-term technical strategy.
Technologies Used
Backend: PHP, Java (Kotlin), SQL & T-SQL
Frontend: Typescript, Angular
Mobile: Kotlin (Android), Swift (iOS)
QA: Selenium & Apium, TestRails, BrowserStack
Product Management Tools: Segment, Heap, Braze, Google Analytics, LaunchDarkly
Results
- First AB Test implemented in Bitpanda’s onboarding journey
- OAuth endpoints optimized from 2 seconds down to 0.3 seconds
- New Angular-based onboarding portal with flexible journeys adapted to countries and customer types
- Modular onboarding architecture implemented for Android and iOS apps
- Team-level automated QA ensuring highly reliable releases
We are ready for new challenges
