Modernising Digital Banking for a New Generation
Client: Bank of Valletta (BOV)
Malta's largest bank needed to transform its digital banking experience to attract a younger demographic while maintaining the trust and security its customers depend on.
The Challenge
Bank of Valletta is Malta's oldest and largest banking institution, serving over 200,000 customers across the Maltese Islands. However, the bank's digital banking portal had not kept pace with modern fintech expectations. The existing interface was desktop-centric and unintuitive, with a new account onboarding process that required multiple in-branch visits and manual document submissions.
Younger customers -- particularly the 18-35 demographic -- were increasingly turning to digital-first neobanks like Revolut and Wise for everyday banking, eroding BOV's market share in a critical growth segment. Customer support was overwhelmed with basic enquiries about navigation, transactions, and account features that should have been self-service, driving up operational costs.
The bank's technology team also faced constraints: the legacy portal was built on a tightly coupled architecture that made iterating on the user experience slow and risky, with any change requiring extensive regression testing across the entire system.
The Solution
We led a comprehensive redesign of BOV's digital banking portal, starting with extensive user research and usability testing across different customer segments. The new front end was built on React with TypeScript, providing a fast, responsive, mobile-first experience that works flawlessly across all devices.
The onboarding flow was completely reimagined -- new customers can now open an account entirely online with identity verification powered by OCR document scanning and biometric checks. The multi-step process was condensed into a streamlined journey that takes minutes rather than days, all while meeting Malta Financial Services Authority (MFSA) regulatory requirements.
On the back end, we built a Node.js API layer hosted on Azure that acts as a modern facade over the bank's core banking system, exposing clean RESTful APIs consumed by the front end. Authentication was upgraded to OAuth 2.0 with multi-factor authentication, and the entire system was designed with a modular architecture allowing the bank's internal team to ship incremental improvements without full regression cycles.
The Results
Faster Onboarding
Minutes not days
More Mobile Users
Year-on-year growth
Fewer Support Tickets
Reduction in queries
App Store Rating
Up from 2.8
The redesigned portal achieved a 60% reduction in average onboarding time, with new customers completing the full account opening process in under ten minutes. Mobile banking usage surged by 40% within six months of launch, with the 18-35 demographic showing the strongest adoption. Support ticket volume dropped by 25% as self-service features resolved the most common queries. The app store rating climbed from 2.8 to 4.6 stars, reflecting a dramatically improved customer experience.
Technology Stack
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