Building trust through stable systems

Creditplus Bank AG

Initial situation

An online installment loan in just 15 minutes? Loan payout the very next working day? Shortened and paperless processes? Could this work? Yes, if the supporting systems perform at their peak, as is the case at Creditplus Bank AG, a provider of consumer loans via retail outlets, branches and the Internet.

“Money and finances are a very trust-intensive topic. When a customer takes out a loan through our website, everything has to work smoothly. Long response times or low availability significantly reduce people’s confidence in us,” says Philipp Schneider, Head of Application Operations at Creditplus.

As a financing partner with global, financially strong cooperation partners, the company must be optimally positioned when new partner products are launched on the market. At times, the financial inquiries multiply from one day to the next. Novatec’s task: to check the website’s credit application process and ensure that the systems work flawlessly, even at peak load.

Approach

Our team at Novatec analyzed a Creditplus application’s web performance to reduce bounce rates on the web application.

To this end, we identified and eliminated performance problems so that user requests are perceived as fast and fluid on different browsers and mobile devices. Internal tools of the various browsers and performance tools specializing in web analysis were used for this purpose.

Novatec carried out various load tests to check performance under different conditions. How do systems react to average requests, increasing loads and peak loads – for example on days when a cooperation partner launches a new product on the market? Bottlenecks were found both in the hardware resources and in the software. Consequently, both sides were examined more closely. While hardware bottlenecks could be quickly resolved by reconfiguring server environments, software bottlenecks had to be examined more closely. Novatec used inspectIT, an open source tool, for this analysis.

This quickly revealed that Magnolia content management system web content was being recalculated with every request. This was despite the content always remaining the same. As a result, Magnolia’s Dynamic Page Caching module was installed, which was introduced with Magnolia version 5.4. The result: five times faster request times!

Novatec set up continuous, automated performance testing to ensure long-term system performance when software changes are made. This is conducted as part of the Continuous Integration Pipeline and reports whether software changes have an impact on performance to the developers at an early stage and on a regular basis.

Results

“I am particularly impressed with how quickly and comprehensively Novatec acted. Within a week, we had an in-depth analysis with concrete recommendations for action. We were able to immediately apply them,” says Schneider. “This significantly reduced our customers’ waiting time. Our interface is more user-friendly and there are virtually no more aborts due to timeouts. We can also meet all of our cooperation partners’ performance requirements.”

Application Performance Management

Thanks to our core competence in Application Performance Management (APM), we are one of the leading providers in this field in German-speaking countries. We optimize your business success by ensuring and improving software system performance.

We support you with tailor-made solutions – from planning and load testing to firefights. Whether with commercial or with our own free tools: we secure your application performance.

The client – Creditplus Bank

Creditplus Bank AG is a highly specialized consumer credit bank operating in the fields of sales financing, personal loans and dealer financing. Headquartered in Stuttgart, it has 18 branches throughout Germany and 624 employees (as of 2017). Creditplus is part of the Crédit Agricole Group through its French consumer finance group CA Consumer Finance. It operates a networked multi-channel system that optimally combines sales channels such as branches, the internet, sales financing and partner banking.

This creates synergies and offers customers every conceivable way to access their desired loan