Customertimes + Creative Dock: Keeping an Industry Disruptor on Track

One of Europe’s largest banks has a mobile app that makes banking easier for individual entrepreneurs. It’s called Fairo, an all-in-one solution for freelancers and SMB owners to easily manage business operations like invoices, payments, bookkeeping, and tax reporting. 

Creative Dock is the bank’s prime contractor, responsible for building and maintaining the Fairo app, so as the bank prepared to launch Fairo in a new market, they reached out to Creative Dock for additional support. Creative Dock began a search for expert developers and QA specialists to work on the project, but finding the right highly skilled team was not an easy task.  

“Hiring was very slow,” says Zdenek Cerny, CTO of Creative Dock. “We were ready to do the project, but it wasn’t easy to find people with the requisite expertise, and, you know, we had a deadline. We reached out to Customertimes, and in a very short time, they helped us set up two full-fledged cross-functional teams.” 

For each of the two teams, Customertimes provided React Native and Java/Kotlin developers, QA engineers, Business Analysts, and Scrum Masters. We also provided an Automation QA team to help with automation testing.  

The teams from Customertimes were incorporated into the existing Creative Dock business structure, and the app was completed on time.  

It has since moved into an evergreen Continuous Development and maintenance phase that is managed by Customertimes, with developers and architects from CT handling new feature requests. 

“Fairo is a semi-digital bank, and it’s an industry disruptor for the gig economy,” Cerny explains. “A SaaS product like this typically takes several years to build, but with Customertimes, we were able to complete it in a relatively short amount of time. 

“The pool at Customertimes is filled with good people. They were open to feedback and willing to work with whatever we needed. When the project started, 60% of the resources were from Customertimes, and now, 90% of the people handling Fairo development in Ukraine are from Customertimes.” 

Fairo will remain in that continuous development cycle for the next several years, with new features and updates to the user experience being added often. Customertimes will handle those updates, maintaining and improving Fairo so the bank can add continue to add new users and deepen their relationship with existing customers.  

“From the very beginning, we had good, open communication with the Customertimes team,” says Cerny. “No one from Customertimes ever told us that something couldn’t be done. They found a way to make it work.” 

For more on the Fairo project, read the case study here.