How Neo Financial cut time spent on infrastructure admin by 50%

Neo Financial is a next-generation banking app and Canada’s fastest-growing financial services company. They’re leveraging Vercel's frontend cloud to enhance their web development process, boost performance, and meet industry security standards—all while saving on resources.

To support their hypergrowth, their team recognized the need for a robust web experience for seamless, fast, and secure banking. They started out with Next.js on a custom, self-made solution based on AWS Fargate with some static hosting and S3. This setup proved to be extremely time and resource intensive. To curb tech debt and quickly-bleeding resources, they moved to Vercel’s full-service frontend cloud, which resulted in an immediate 50% reduction of their infrastructure administrative effort.

“Vercel is definitely the best infrastructure as a service I've ever used. Not only have they set the bar the very high, but they continue to redefine what is possible on the web. It's rare to have a partner that delivers beyond expectations so reliably and consistently.Vercel is definitely the best infrastructure as a service I've ever used. Not only have they set the bar the very high, but they continue to redefine what is possible on the web. It's rare to have a partner that delivers beyond expectations so reliably and consistently.”

Dean Rud, Director of Marketing Technology

Improved rendering and performance

Vercel's seamless integration with Next.js provided Neo Financial with out-of-the-box server rendering capabilities. This allowed them to enhance their search engine optimization efforts and deliver fast-loading pages to their customers with an average page load speed improvement of 77%.

By leveraging Vercel's performance optimizations, they achieved industry-leading speed and performance, ensuring a smooth user experience. Thanks to Edge Middleware, they were also able to add seamless translations from English to French to aid their Canadian user base.

The combination of server rendering and optimized performance resulted in faster page load times and improved customer satisfaction. Users could access their banking information quickly and efficiently, enhancing their overall experience.

Better collaboration for a faster release process

Vercel's platform empowered Neo Financial's engineers to work collaboratively and deploy updates with ease. With their Contentful CMS and Vercel Preview Deployments, they eliminated the need for separate staging environments, which enabled multiple teams to test, collaborate, and iterate simultaneously. The result was a significant reduction in release cycle time and the ability to roll out new features and improvements rapidly.

The ability to release multiple updates per day enabled Neo to iterate quickly and respond to market demands promptly. They could test new features, gather user feedback, and continuously improve their customer portal.

Building for scale with reliability and security

As a banking app, security and compliance were paramount for Neo Financial. Vercel's infrastructure came with industry-standard security certifications, such as SOC, providing peace of mind regarding data protection and privacy. They were confident in hosting their banking portal on Vercel, knowing that their users' sensitive financial information was in safe hands, while keeping experiences performant.

Vercel's scalable infrastructure ensured that Neo's customer portal could handle increased user traffic without compromise. The platform's robust architecture and global CDN (Content Delivery Network) helped them deliver consistent experiences to their customers across various regions with a service uptime improvement of 0.30%.

“Our core business is banking and financial services so now we are able to invest our engineering resources in building features for those users instead of building infrastructure. Our core business is banking and financial services so now we are able to invest our engineering resources in building features for those users instead of building infrastructure. ”

Ian Sutherland, Principal Software Engineer

Vercel's support for server-rendering with Next.js, collaboration features, scalability, and industry-leading security certifications made it the ideal choice for Neo Financial's mission-critical applications.