We learned what challenges the developers of one of the country's largest banking superapps face and how they solve them.
"We want to create a large professional IT community"
Amid growing competition, Halyk Bank remains one of the largest employers in Kazakhstan. The IT block employs over 800 people, and as new services are launched, the bank is actively hiring specialists.
The BaaS platform offers four key services for microfinance organizations (MFIs):
- Instant crediting of loan funds from a Halyk card to an MFI account;
- Loan repayment from the client's card;
- GovTech access to government services within the MFI app;
- KYC — authorization and primary client identification using Halyk ID.
"The solution reduces Time to Market, lowers the technical load, simplifies document flow, and decreases MFI communication costs. For users, it is an opportunity to get a loan, pay off debt, or use government services in a couple of clicks," added Roman Tretyakov, Head of the Neobank Department at Halyk.
"This year, we decided to enter the external market and create a large professional community for digital profession representatives. Through accumulated expertise and experience exchange, we want to contribute to the development of the Kazakhstani IT industry. We are starting with one of the most interesting areas — frontend systems development, including banking applications and websites," noted Andrey Zavarzin, Deputy Chairman of the Management Board for IT at Halyk Bank, in his welcoming speech.
As part of the Halyk Tech Sprints series, the organizers will cover all key IT areas, from infrastructure and classic development to big data, AI in fintech, and BaaS services.
"Initially, we planned to start with intimate meetups on narrow IT topics, but even before launching the ads, we received more applications for participation than there were available seats. Specialists of various levels came to the first event, be it juniors, middles, and even team leads. It is pleasant that Kazakhstani specialists strive to contribute to the development of large-scale services, and as a large corporation, we create all the conditions and excellent career opportunities for this. Halyk Bank received the status of 'Top Employer 2025' in Kazakhstan according to the international organization Top Employers Institute. The bank became the first Kazakhstani brand awarded this status, demonstrating a high level of HR practice maturity and surpassing global benchmarks in a number of key human capital management indicators," comments Indira Ashirova, HRD of Halyk Bank.
There will also be gamification. Participants of the first meetup were issued a Halyk tech passport to collect stamps for attending each of the 7 events. The most active visitors will be entered into a draw for valuable prizes.
"We are actively transforming and want to show the market that in our bank, you can work with world-class enterprise-level technologies. Moreover, we have a lot of such areas," says Aldiar Arystanbayev, Director of the Innovative Technologies Department at Halyk. "The bank serves about 12.5 million users across Kazakhstan, so any new product or feature is designed for the broad masses. Accordingly, each speaker can share a unique experience where the cost of a mistake is very high. You usually won't hear about such cases in broad circles."
"We can roll out a new feature in 5-10 minutes"
The Dev Meetup program was opened by Teamlead DevOps Andrey Kirilov with a report on IT infrastructure management practices and their impact on digital product creation. The term DevOps itself implies an approach at the intersection of development (Dev) and operations teams (Ops). Its task is to ensure the fast launch of digital services, as well as their stable operation, fault tolerance, and scaling.
While developers write code, DevOps engineers put it to work in the right environment, for example, on a server or in the cloud. Such specialists are responsible for monitoring the entire infrastructure and services needed by developers for coding and other daily tasks. For example, without them, it will not be possible to quickly "roll back prod" — to cancel changes launched into the working version of the product (production) when something needs to be fixed.
"As a rule, the work of DevOps engineers is not visible until something breaks. For example, if there is a network failure or a developer's coding application crashes, colleagues turn to us. We are also responsible for the convenience of the infrastructure. About 300-400 different microservices run on the basis of the Halyk Onlinebank application, and their support requires a centralized approach. By implementing it, we can roll out a new feature or update in about 5-10 minutes, including prod and the test environment," says Andrey Kirilov.
"This AI system recreates the user's journey from the first click to the occurrence of an error"
In the second presentation, Developer Onlinebank Yaroslav Sedyshev shared a case of optimizing the Halyk iOS application for entrepreneurs with an audience of over 500,000 active users. According to the specialist, with such a client base, the responsibility for development is literally felt at the fingertips.
"The Onlinebank application has been operating since 2019. For many years, its codebase grew rapidly and uncontrollably. At some point, loading the app began to take almost 10 seconds. We took measures and were able to speed up the loading time to 2 seconds. Moreover, we optimized the application even for older devices like the iPhone 7, 8, and X, which are used by about 1,500 of our clients. To rectify the situation, we audited all libraries (subroutines) and raised the minimum supported iOS version from 13 to 13.4. Then we optimized processes, abandoned some solutions, and regularly reduced the codebase," recalls Yaroslav Sedyshev.
In the second part of the meetup, an expert from the Performance company spoke about the implementation of the Dynatrace system in the bank. The system's functionality includes several areas — from monitoring infrastructure and applications to business processes and indicators, marketing strategy effectiveness, and more.
Under Dynatrace's observation are 21 systems, including the mobile application and infrastructure services responsible for the uninterrupted operation of the bank. As a result, it reduces the downtime of banking services and affects business indicators.
"We regularly use WebView where appropriate and significantly save time for iOS and Android developers. This approach is especially justified when the business does not have time to wait for updates to be published in the App Store and Google Play, and its requirements can change quickly. For example, in 2024 during the Air Astana IPO, the page design was updated every hour — banners, visuals, accents. While competitors were preparing new releases and passing checks, we were already rolling out changes right on the fly. Thanks to the relevance and speed of updates, Halyk became the leader in submitted applications," shared Ilyas Sagimbekov.
In the final presentation, Developer Halyk SuperApp Aidos Baktayev explained how search works in the superapp and what challenges his team faced as the application developed. With the growth of content and the addition of new sections, searching for relevant queries became more complicated. As a result, developers had to revise the query building logic and add stop words.
"At the start of developing the new search engine, we received 300,000 queries per month. With the addition of new sections, including Halyk Market, and improved ranking, we passed the milestone of 1 million search queries in December 2024. And in March, we exceeded the 2 million queries mark. In parallel with our growth indicators, the conversion within the superapp also increased. At the same time, we continue to improve the search function, conduct various studies, and plan to implement AI tools, including a personal voice assistant," noted Aidos Baktayev.
At the end of the meetup, HRD Halyk Indira Ashirova and Director of the Innovative Technologies Department at Halyk Aldiar Arystanbayev summarized the event and announced the next one. In particular, one of the speakers will tell how the bank's developers managed to ensure the uninterrupted operation of the service during the start of ticket sales for the Backstreet Boys concert.
The schedule of upcoming meetups and registration are available on the organizers' official page.
