As a commitment to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), one of the big four Australian banks concentrates not only on its personal banking services but also on the financial well-being of communities.
Discussing the primary purpose of the bank, which is “shaping a world where people and communities thrive,” the CEO believed that simple acts of everyday kindness could enable tremendous change. To encourage the way people contribute to great causes as part of their daily lives, the company had come to the critical decision of acquiring Shout For Good Pty Ltd, a corporation that designed a digital fundraising platform allowing people to access over 150 charities worldwide.
Reinventing the way people give
The primary objective of the bank’s Community Giving Program is to make regular and one-off donations to community organizations. As their customers have become more interested in charitable giving and they’re also preferring using mobile devices to get information and facilitate their payments, the digital donation platform is worth considering.
“We intended to provide a more simple, relevant, and transparent way for our tech-savvy customers to donate. Shout makes giving more accessible for everyone by supporting desktop, mobile, and tablet uses.” the CEO said.
Thus, after being acquired, Shout was conceived with the goal of increasing micro-donations, especially among younger donors and those who use smart devices. As a part of the company’s broader strategy, Shout can connect individuals and communities to the causes they care about by providing a trusted fundraising solution.
Scaling up to build an adaptable donation platform
As there’re different ways of fundraising, from collecting on-the-spot donations to receiving a keyword SMS, the idea of creating a full-featured platform was formed to cover massive customer needs. To achieve that goal, the bank demanded a skillful and experienced team to manage the entire software development cycle. This also means they needed to scale their technical team to stay up-to-date on the latest technology and ensure the product meets the estimated launching time.
When it comes to the decision to grow their workforce, the corporation considered the solution between outsourcing and building an in-house technical team. Since the company needed to concentrate on the core business aspects and to form such an expert team in Australia is time and effort-consuming, it finally ended up with IT outsourcing due to its several advantages. Moreover, the shortage of available tech talents in Australia also leads to the higher costs of forming an internal technical team. In search of the right partner, the bank was impressed by the KMS dedicated team and turned to them for the end-to-end engineering solution, from product development to operation support.
Over 8-year cooperation for the entire software development life cycle
The bank initially chose KMS talents for the primary need of ensuring the project’s time-to-market was committed. During the partnership, it was provided with trending technology stacks and comprehensive engagement. To support the strategy of expanding product offerings for catering to all businesses and organizations, as well as a new user-friendly website and updated APP, the team has grown its size by six times to twenty members until now.
Considering the platform’s stable development process, KMS proposed team involvement in each stage, from Requirement, Implementation, and Testing to Production Deployment. The team structure includes Business Analysts, who will review and break down the business requirement refinement. The development team developed the product by using the Ruby on Rails framework for the back-end and ReactJs for the front-end. Besides that, the team also works on various testing skills and techniques like manual, automation, load test, and security
testing. Additionally, the deployment is also an essential part of the team with a CI/CD server that helps the team deploy products automatically using Jenkin on AWS cloud services.
Nam Pham, KMS Technology Engineering Manager, said: “After cooperating for over eight years, KMS can understand the client needs thoroughly and base on those to refine the development process and delineate product roadmap for the following years.”
Building a digital platform for charity purposes
In the beginning, the Shout platform had four main categories, including Fund, Blade, Button, and SMS supporting desktop, tablet, and mobile devices. After years of improvement, the product suites now have two new features, which are Terminal and QR. This innovative digital fundraising solution provides users with a seamless donation experience by implementing the latest technology. From this platform, users can contribute to great causes conveniently and safely at any time.
As a commitment to assisting the not-for-profit sector and encouraging charity, Shout has removed its annual subscription costs and fees related to commission, ongoing, and transactions. The platform has constantly asserted itself and gained a total fundraise increasing by 208% in 2018 compared to 2017. So far, Shout has fundraised over $43 million over the platform and supported many Australian charities.
Driving ongoing growth
The contribution of the KMS robust right-hand technical team not only helped the Shout rapidly adapt to the market but also helped their client keep up its goals continually year by year. Moreover, by scaling up its development team with KMS talents, the company can ensure the platform’s stability and constant updates to catch the customers’ demands.
With the help of the KMS’s dedicated team, the primary mission of changing the way the world gives was put into practice and is continuously rising to spread the care to other people. After all, the project is expected to grow and hence, support more charities in Australia.
“It was amazing to see you all come together and have fun and propose new features for our platform. If it weren’t for you, we would not be able to assist as many charities and individuals as we do. I’ll leave you with an inspirational quote from Steve jobs – Steve Jobs once said Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them. I think this KMS team can help Shout do wonderful things for the world.” – the CEO said.
Want to know how the bank confronted the challenges? Read our full case study here!
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