How Moka launched its operations in Europe with Forest Admin

During my 20-year career, I have built about 20-ish internal tools in B2B and B2C companies. It’s always the least-liked product on the development side, because it doesn’t directly generate revenue. However, the operational costs associated with poorly functioning and maintained internal tools can be very high!

Vincent Deschenes, VP of engineering

About Moka

Launched in 2017, Moka (ex Mylo) is on a mission to help millennials achieve their financial goals. The company offers an app that enables users to save and invest by rounding up purchases made. It is also developing other innovative products to help its users save more, spend less, and invest smarter.

The app has more than half a million users in Canada and is expanding to Europe by launching in France.

Vincent D. VP of Soft Dev & Liam C. Executive chairman

Liam Cheung - executive chairman, and Vincent Deschenes - VP of Software Development managed the integration of Forest Admin at Moka. They are using MongoDB with Node.js as their main tech stacks.

Meet Moka

Be fully operational quickly to launch a new market

Moka’s engineering team had already built the 2nd generation of their internal tool. It met roughly 80% of their needs. The remaining 20% still required manual actions by developers (e.g., Postman APIs calls, direct MongoDB data manipulation, etc.).

Operations in a B2C fintech are critical. A powerful internal tool is a competitive advantage when scaling your business…

Liam Cheung, Executive chairman

To launch in France, they had to either improve their exiting tool or build the 3rd generation tool from scratch. They faced several challenges:

Overcome time-to-market time constraints.
Comply with European regulations (ACPR, AMF).
Define ownership for the development of their internal tools because the team was mainly dedicated to the customer-facing application.

A 100% flexible tool, fast to deploy

Maxime Lemaitre recommended Forest Admin after he had been hearing a lot of good things about it in the FinTech community (see our case study with Qonto and Spendesk)

After a quick setup, Liam was able to set up a PoC. Within a few days, it was clear that Forest Admin was the best solution to replace their existing tools and scale serenely.

The learning curve is very fast for someone like me coming from the Javascript and Node.js world. The fact that Forest Admin’s architecture allows us to channel all our data exchange through our VPN makes it a no-brainer.

Liam Cheung, Executive chairman

Forest Admin implementation timeline

His key reasons for choosing Forest Admin were:

Built-in teams and permission. Having different teams on two continents (Canada and France), it is always tricky to implement a robust permission system.
Built-in Audit Trail & user authentication to ensure SOC 2 compliance.
Data privacy & security. Forest Admin’s architecture works very well if you really want to keep full control of your data. Moka’s data sits in a Virtual Private Cloud fully managed and controlled by the Moka IT department.

Forest Admin built-in activity logs make it easy to monitor Moka operators’ actions

Technical debt has been removed thanks to a tool that now evolves as fast as the company

Within a few weeks, a fully-featured Admin Panel was ready for the launch in France. Forest Admin’s fast learning curve allowed them to implement all their processes on the same interface. The team was not only able to quickly build a tool for its operational teams in France but also moved its Canadian team to Forest Admin.

Forest Admin has helped us absorb our technical debt and significantly reduce our maintenance costs. Forest Admin has cut out worthless interactions between engineers and business teams to perform redundant tasks that do not provide long-term value. This kind of optimization can save a company thousands of dollars.

Vincent Deschenes, VP of engineering

Engineers don’t have to worry about maintaining UIs, managing permissions, or optimizing performance. If they use a new third-party service, they just need to put in place new buttons making custom API calls. If they open a new country or work with freelancers, they can manage the UI and permissions without code.

One of the last key points of Forest Admin is that the tool respects all code development standards. With Forest Admin, the code is versioned and hosted by the client. This is an essential factor in facilitating maintenance for engineers.

Forest Admin’s code is hosted and versioned at the customer’s side for better collaboration between developers

Takeaways

Forest Admin has saved a considerable amount of time for Moka’s engineering team and has allowed them to focus their energy on their launch in Europe. It has also helped the Support and Ops teams gain autonomy and achieve best in class customer support and retention of their 500M+ customers.

Moka and Forest Admin in a nutshell:

8 teams onboarded: KYC/Identity Verification, Customer Service, QA, Product, DevOps, Operations, Freelances, Advisors
20 workflows implemented: Onboarding, KYC, Fraud management, Document Management System, Financial flow management, etc.
5 integrations: MongoDB, Treezor, Intercom, AWS S3, Fusebill

Special thanks to Liam and Vincent for their time! This story is part of our user success stories series, read more here.

What's next?

If you want to build your Admin Panel with Forest Admin: visit our website.
If you want more details on the way our customers use Forest Admin, don't hesitate to contact us.