Northwind Bank
Reimagining business banking for SMBs

Northwind had been running the same core banking interface since 2013. It worked — technically — but the activation rate for new SMB customers had been declining for three straight years. The interface was slow, the mobile experience was non-existent, and the engineering team had stopped shipping features because every change risked breaking something downstream.

We started with a two-week discovery sprint embedded with their product and compliance teams. The biggest insight wasn't technical — it was that 60% of new users abandoned onboarding at the document-upload step because the flow assumed desktop. The fix was mobile-first onboarding with camera-based document capture, which became the single highest-impact change in the entire rebuild.

The migration strategy was the hardest part. We couldn't take the platform offline — Northwind processes real payments for real businesses every day. We built a parallel system running alongside the legacy stack, migrated accounts in batches over eight weeks, and ran both systems simultaneously with automated reconciliation checks every fifteen minutes.

The new platform is Next.js with a Node.js API layer, Postgres with row-level security for multi-tenant isolation, and Terraform-managed AWS infrastructure. The frontend is fast enough that Northwind's support team stopped getting 'the app is slow' tickets within a month of launch.