Rewards paid in gold, with every gram accounted for.
Run a platform where real money moves every day, and need it modernised without putting anyone's savings at risk? GoldBits turns everyday spending into real gold: rewards that hold their value, where most programmes pay in points. We modernised their platform while it kept growing, and opened a new channel to customers along the way.
At a glance
- 01
Client. GoldBits, a South African gold savings and investment platform.
- 02
Industry. Fintech: regulated savings.
- 03
Delivered. Development, testing and project management for the live platform and its modernisation, plus a new customer channel.
- 04
Team. One team across development, QA, project management and business analysis.
- 05
Platform. Web and VodaPay.
Rewards worth keeping
Most rewards programmes pay out in points. They pay out in physical gold: spend with a partner, and part of it comes back as gold you own, alongside the option to save and invest in gold directly. As a regulated financial services provider, every rand that comes in and every gram it buys has to line up.
After moving on from their previous development partner, they wanted a team that could keep the platform growing, with new products and new channels, and give it a modern foundation underneath.
None of it could wait for the platform to stand still.
Every change touches someone's savings
On a savings platform, a release is never just a release. It runs through money people have put aside for their future, and through records a regulator expects to be right. Ship carelessly and trust goes; freeze to be careful and growth stops. They needed the platform to keep changing, with complete certainty about the money.
Their books stayed the source of truth
Taking over a live financial platform means taking responsibility for every record in it, so we made the business's own books the source of truth. Every record was checked against them, and the work was documented and signed off by their team. In a regulated product, nothing should change without the owner's say.
The same discipline applied going forward: every change to the platform, large or small, was scoped and agreed with them before work began.
Every gram accounted for, and every change agreed.
How we built it
These are the principles behind the work, on a platform that customers kept using throughout.
One team for today and tomorrow
Growth wasn't going to wait for a modernisation to finish. So one team carried both: keeping the platform running and shipping what the business needed now, while modernising it for what comes next.
Ready to run it before changing it
Before we changed anything, we made sure we could build, test and release every part of the platform ourselves, the same way every time. Taking over safely came first.
Security from the start
The modernisation began with security, and security stayed part of every piece of work after that.
One consistent way of building
We modernised the platform from end to end and brought all of it into one consistent structure. Every part is now built, tested and released the same way, which makes each change easier to reason about and safer to ship.
Compliance kept pace with the code
In a regulated business, the paperwork is part of the product. As the platform changed, the documentation a financial services provider has to keep changed with it.
A team sized to the work
The team grew when there was more to carry and stepped back when there was less, so they always paid for the work in front of them.
Room to grow, on a platform they own
They run a modern platform they own and can take forward, and a new channel reaches customers inside VodaPay, an app many of them already use every day.
All of it delivered without pausing the business.
Keep going
Real money on your platform? Let's keep every gram accounted for.
Tell us about a project like this.