IT outsourcing
Core platform modernisation for a UAE fintech
A UAE-licensed payments and lending fintech serving small and medium businesses across the Emirates.
- Industry
- Technology and Startups
- Pillar
- IT outsourcing
- Client geography
- United Arab Emirates
- Delivery location
- Dubai engineering pod with distributed specialists
- Languages
- English C1, Arabic B2
- Engagement model
- Dedicated engineering pod
- Timeline
- Eighteen months, delivered in four releases
The challenge
The platform that had carried the company through its first four years could not carry it through the next four. Deployments took a full weekend and were reversed roughly one time in four. Arabic language support had been retrofitted and the right to left interface was visibly broken in several journeys, which mattered because Arabic-preferring users were the fastest growing segment. Adding a new lending product took months. The company's own engineers spent most of their time maintaining rather than building, and the founders were losing engineers to that frustration.
What Corpshore did
We placed a dedicated eight person engineering pod, six in Dubai and two distributed specialists, working inside the client's own delivery process rather than alongside it. The pod took a strangler approach, extracting capabilities from the monolith one bounded context at a time behind a stable API layer, so that the business continued shipping throughout instead of pausing for a rewrite.
Priority order was set by risk rather than by architectural preference: payments and ledger first, then identity and onboarding, then the lending product engine, then the customer-facing application. The Arabic and right to left rebuild was treated as a first-class workstream with its own design review, not as a localisation task at the end.
We rebuilt the delivery pipeline in parallel, introduced automated testing where there had been almost none, and put observability in place before the first extraction went live.
Delivery model
Dedicated pod, hybrid Dubai, embedded in the client's agile process with shared standups, shared backlog and joint architecture review.
Results
- Deployment frequency moved from roughly monthly to multiple times per week.
- Change failure rate reduced from around 25 percent to under 5 percent.
- Time to launch a new lending product reduced from months to weeks.
- Automated test coverage on extracted services reached 78 percent against a starting position close to zero.
- Arabic user engagement increased significantly following the right to left rebuild.
- The client's own engineers moved back onto product work, and voluntary attrition on the engineering team fell.
Why it worked
The client had been quoted a rewrite by two other firms. A rewrite would have frozen the product for a year in a market that was moving. Incremental extraction was slower on paper and faster in reality.
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This is a representative engagement. The client is anonymised, and the figures are drawn from engagement reporting. We do not name a client without written consent, and we do not publish a number we cannot evidence.