Summary

Founded in 2016, Qonto is one of the largest and most successful finance solutions providers in France, serving over 500k customers. Its mission is to simplify banking and financial management for SMEs, startups, and entrepreneurs and delivering a great mobile app experience is central to achieving this goal. With this in mind, Qonto partnered with Bitrise to streamline mobile development and expand its app capabilities to support its future growth. As a result of this partnership, it has achieved faster releases, reduced maintenance overheads, and quicker delivery of new financial features to its growing customer base.

Challenge

Qonto’s mobile app solution plays a crucial role in its mission to simplify financial management for small businesses, making it easy for customers to manage their banking and business operations on the go. In order to meet its customers' changing needs and improve its time to market, the company needed to improve the speed and stability of its mobile development. "At the beginning, there was less pressure to release faster, but as we grew, it became a key focus," shared Francisco, Staff iOS Engineer for Qonto.

The company operates in diverse markets, each with unique objectives. Its mobile app must cater to these varied customer bases while ensuring a consistent experience. With more than ten teams focused on developing features for different markets, there are many moving parts to manage to ensure customers get what they need as quickly as possible.

“We strive to stay competitive by delivering faster than our competitors and providing an exceptional customer experience. So our goal is always to release the features they need as quickly as possible.”
‍_{Francisco José Cantero González, Staff iOS Engineer, Qonto}

Qonto also faced a significant challenge managing its own continuous integration (CI) solution, which relied on Mac Minis hosted on company premises. As a result of this setup, the team had to constantly update various desktop versions and ensure compatibility across multiple operating systems.

"We used to release every few weeks. It was a pretty tedious process that took about four days, mainly because most of the release steps were manual."
‍_{Francisco José Cantero González, Staff iOS Engineer, Qonto}

When the COVID pandemic forced its engineers to work remotely, maintaining Qonto’s legacy CI solution became increasingly problematic. This prompted Qonto to look for a more stable, efficient, and scalable mobile CI solution to support its growing needs.

For Qonto, time to market, maintenance effort, and velocity were the most important factors in selecting a new CI solution. To make an informed decision, the team researched and analyzed several solutions available on the market. Based on all their key performance metrics, Bitrise came out on top.

Solution

Bitrise products adopted:

CI/CD

Insights

"We chose Bitrise after an extensive review of the tools available. It was its combination of velocity, availability, and stability that made it the clear choice for us."
‍_{Francisco José Cantero González, Staff iOS Engineer, Qonto}

Bitrise supported Qonto to migrate smoothly from its legacy solution to Bitrise's CI/CD platform. Since then, Qonto has continued to expand its use of Bitrise to optimize its mobile development processes, leveraging functionality like save-cache to accelerate releases.

"We’ve been implementing new features from Bitrise over the past few years, like save-cache. It’s so easy to test the functionality thoroughly using Bitrise CI. The documentation is so well written, it’s allowed us to handle most things ourselves right out of the box, which is really great."
‍_{Francisco José Cantero González, Staff iOS Engineer, Qonto}

Benefits

“We've significantly improved our release time by using multiple pipelines to run our tests faster. Our release time has been shortened from four days, almost a week, to just one day. That's only been possible thanks to the automation and tooling combination provided by Bitrise.”
‍_{‍Francisco José Cantero González, Staff iOS Engineer, Qonto}

• Faster release cycles

  Thanks to increased CI availability and speed with Bitrise, Qonto has reduced release time from an average of 4 days to just 1 day, enabling quicker delivery of new features, updates, and fixes.
• Reduced maintenance overhead

  Previously relying on a self-hosted CI system (Mac mini), Qonto now benefits from Bitrise's fully hosted CI, allowing the team to focus on other important tasks, "Focusing more on features and less on hardware and maintenance updates has helped us a lot," says Francisco.
• Cost and time savings

  The move to Bitrise has resulted in savings in both time and resources thanks to faster development and pipeline cycles—contributing to the company's overall efficiency goals. 
• Faster time to market

  With faster pipelines and the ability to run tests concurrently, the team can deliver updates and new features quickly, improving its agility and responsiveness to market demands.
• Confident self-service

  The Qonto mobile development team can easily test and use new Bitrise features thanks to comprehensive support documentation, which has given them the confidence to self-serve and use their time efficiently, "So far, we haven't had to contact Bitrise support much because the documentation is so good, but we always know support is there if we need it," adds Francisco.
• Greater focus on innovation

  Without the need to dedicate close to a week for releases or worry about infrastructure upkeep, Qonto can now focus on developing new features and getting that new functionality to its customers faster.

"Bitrise gives us more time to focus on building the features our customers need. Our goal is always to deliver the perfect product, and now we can dedicate more time to that without worrying about infrastructure or maintenance. It’s been a huge win for us. We've created a great connection with Bitrise. It feels like a partnership. We're really happy with the platform and the value it provides to us and our customers."
‍‍_{‍Francisco José Cantero González, Staff iOS Engineer, Qonto}

The future

“Releases feel almost effortless now—just trigger the pipeline, and it's all done. With a stable mobile solution now in place, we can shift our focus to adding more features and delivering even more value to our customers.”
‍‍_{‍Francisco José Cantero González, Staff iOS Engineer, Qonto}

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