“55% of our users do not use the web version at all” - Tinkoff.ru about mobile development

For which bank is mobile development more important than for others? For the one that abandoned the physical departments, focusing on the site and applications: this has more clients solving all the questions through the application. How many Tinkoff.ru clients use only this channel? What does mobile development look like in a company? How much are they chasing new products and do they believe in the prospects of cross-platform development?

Tinkoff.ru participated in our Mobius conference, and we asked questions to two employees: the head of HR projects, Olga Shpuntenko, and the architect Alexander Shishkin .

Olga Shpuntenko

- Do we understand correctly, looking from the outside, that for Tinkoff.ru, because of the rejection of the “classical” communication channels, mobile development is especially important? Can you share the statistics, which part of your customers is “mobile only”?
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- Yes, right. Of course, we have a “classic” telephone channel, but mostly we work through instant messengers, social networks and, of course, mobile applications. Recently it was believed that 55% of our customers use only the mobile version, and the share is growing. That is, they, you see, do nothing at all through the web version. Of course, we have to rethink every product - can we use it with one hand, which holds the phone? This is not always about the interface, by the way, this is largely about the new approaches.

- And how does this specificity of a “bank without branches” affect the work of developers? Do they have to work in any tangible way other than in other banks?

- We have no idea how they are working in other banks, only terrible echoes about paper helpers for access to servers reach us :) Here, rather, about the attitude to the project. Here you work in a large bank, and you get a salary there. The money is paid, and you transfer the salary to Tinkoff. Our guys have a unique opportunity: in addition to the joy of users, you literally make a product for yourself.

- You have a number of mobile applications, although it would be possible to combine the functionality of several together. Is this an intentional choice? How does it affect the development - does something that is impossible with a single application allow?

- Yes, we deliberately did not sculpt everything into one application, with this approach it is much easier to convey the essence to the user. For our developers, mono-applications are interesting because new approaches can be tested on them not to the detriment of the core business - the mobile bank. Well, you can switch between projects if you suddenly become despondent :)

- You recently said in an interview with the “test & learn approach - this is very cool: you can start any project that will scale if it shoots” - it would be interesting to learn more. What does the developer need in Tinkoff.ru to start any project?

- The idea, of course :) If you can make life easier for a simple Russian citizen, you need to test. If nobody has done this before you, you should try. This, you know, as with an astronaut and a student: if you do not know about the limitations, they are not.
For so many years, the “test” stage began to work quite well - we quickly get the numbers, we understand whether it makes sense to scale the project or not. In general, with all of our aggressive entrepreneurship, in Tinkoff.ru everything is done on the basis of numbers, not sensations.

- In the same interview you said that the company is active in the world of open-source - and where are you contributing to?

- For example, to the Scala ecosystem: fix bugs and finish something in the open Scala-stack projects. Back in December, we talked about Macro Cache, we will soon open officially - with a red ribbon and champagne :)

- In December, the bank announced Napoleonic plans to launch development centers in seven Russian cities - and at what stage is everything now, after a few months? In which cities are you primarily looking for mobile developers?

- Now St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Novosibirsk are already open, on the turn Innopolis and Yekaterinburg; until the end of the year we will open two or three more cities. We hire mobile developers in all cities of presence - in fact, this was the point of opening development centers. Nowadays, infrastructure and broadband Internet exist in many cities, it is not necessary for people to conquer Moscow or St. Petersburg in order to obtain relevant knowledge, communicate with colleagues around the world, etc. Yes, they do not want to move, but they want to do interesting projects and cool tasks.

- Do you have “Fintech-school” - and how long has it appeared? Have there been many cases when someone went through school and stayed to work for you? Are you actively looking for mobile developers?

- In May there will be a second school graduation, from autumn we will have regular kits in September and February. Now we read Android and iOS courses, we plan to make 3 offers for graduates from each mobile stream (30 people were selected for each one). From the first set (July-August 2016) more than 10 graduates work with us.

- Tinkoff.ru exists for about a decade, which by banking standards is very small - does the relatively young age somehow affect the development process? For example, do you feel that the legacy code is a little less constrained?

- For 10 years, you can have a lot of time to nafig :) The world of IT is changing very quickly - for example, for two years, the Android code can change beyond recognition, and all this needs to be maintained. In general, our religion: code and rewrite and maintain well.

Alexander Shishkin

- What are you working at Tinkoff.ru?

- Over MoneyTalk support (client for Telegram with the possibility of money transfer), and also take a big part in the library code: core-functionality for both mobile bank and mono applications, so as not to rewrite the same thing from scratch every time.

- The company is known as “a place where they write on Scala in backend” - and you don’t accidentally use this language in Android? :) And Kotlin, which was heard on Mobius from everywhere? What is the general technological stack in mobile development?

- In the development on Android, we do not use Scala, there is Java. The technology stack is usually given at the mercy of the timlid - we have several teams. But in general, yes, we use Kotlin: it is not a corporate standard for us, but why not try some things.

- Also, Mobius talked a lot about cross-platform solutions like React Native, and in Tinkoff.ru, as far as we understand, mobile development is always native. How do you evaluate cross-platform trend?

- My subjective opinion: I do not believe it. Small applications at the prototype level can be quickly assembled immediately on all platforms. But non-standard interfaces, for example, cannot be immediately rolled out for everything - different platforms still have different behavioral patterns. Universally and well does not work.

- In MoneyTalk, unlike other company applications, you connect to someone else's product. What was the specifics of working with Telegram and the sensations from it?

- We initially understood that people want to use the latest version of the messenger. Therefore, our code is organized in such a way that it can be updated as quickly and easily as possible, without causing any particular difficulties to users.

I really liked this project, because the creator of Telegram has a rather specific view on application development, not all programmers agree with it.

- The company published a text about shortcuts in Android in Habrablog, which appeared recently and is available to only a small part of users. I would like to ask: do you like to deal with new things before they become mainstream?

- Let's just say: innovation for the sake of innovation, we do not. If we understand that some solution falls into a common outline, we will use it. If we talk about the same shortcuts that Telegram originally introduced in our company, then we are tied to their API, so we waited for them to launch them and everything would be tested. We, of course, rethought them: since we are about remittances, we have shortcuts about money.

- On the GitHub at Tinkoff.ru, the Decoro Android library is laid out for the “correct” display of forms when they are completed - and they have probably already tried to solve this task in open source. Is it often the case that open source solutions to typical problems do not suit you, and write your own analogs?

- How did Decoro start - with limitations in our functionality. Formatting usually gives rise to many tasks from testers. The idea came to make a universal solution that would solve all our problems at once in all projects. It is clear that not a single decision could save us completely.

In general, since there are many teams and a lot of developers, everyone has their own opinion. But we are adequate for a glance: sometimes it is worth writing something, once it makes no sense to pull the library for two lines of code.