Software Development Trends: Ukrainian Expert View on Web & Mobile, Cybersecurity, and FinTech
Will AI steal jobs from human beings?
What to expect from hackers in the year to come?
Will Virtual Reality gain its positions?
Top software development companies experts from Ukraine shared their views on these rising issues with Qubit Labs. We asked them to tell about their industry, define leading technology in their niche and make predictions about the future.
FinTech
Yuriy Kostiv, CEO at Team Harbour
Tell us about your company and yourself.
I’ve been working as an IT Manager for more than 20 years. I started as a developer and IT engineer and got promoted up to a regional CTO at Fortune 500 company. Later I got CIO roles in the banking industry. But I wanted to try myself as an IT entrepreneur. That’s why I started my software development business six years ago – Team Harbour. It’s a global software house that deals with FinTech, enterprise integration and e-commerce. We are interested in teams with at least one PM and two developers. Such team structure helps us to get balance between profit and administration expenditures.
Currently our development boutique consists of 29 members, and ⅔ of them are “production” people who work with our clients directly.
Which technology (language) will be on hype in fintech 2019? Why?
AI programming is the thing of the future, and it’s gonna develop further. I believe that AI will get smarter and easier-to-use. Soon we won’t need professional support to work with AI solutions.
AI will be able to write code of good quality, but it won’t steal programmers’ jobs. On the contrary, they will get even more work to do.
What software industry trends one should watch to be up-to-date in FinTech?
Open Banking is inevitably coming, and everyone should comply with PSD2. This opens new possibilities and trigger changes for all the participants of the FinTech universe.
Banks will be significantly less about sales, but more about smooth operational processing centers. The exception would be OEM banks and those who decide to go fully digital. Banks should have been be thinking of an API yesterday, today they must be on the implementation stage at least.
Front office is no longer a mandatory financial institution, but a sales office, same as in insurance and telecom — a shop. Front office will use the license(s) of partner bank(s).
New creative class will get new chances to contribute FinTech with their amazing apps and services.
Naturally, all abovementioned points bring security and compliance requirements to the next level of precision and standardization.
If you were about to invest money in 2019, what project would you choose and why?
I would definitely invest into FinTech projects with the elements of AI, but very sober rational use of AI. Buzzword is not enough for me. AI is great for taking large amount of simple decisions – it can be utilized nowadays in such processes as KYC, credit issue decisions, document classification, and image recognition.
How do you see FinTech market in Ukraine in 2019? What should companies expect?
As the digital ledger hype is gone, a FinTech investor is back hunting for some good traditional FinTech projects. The market might grow next year, but the analysts speak of upcoming recession again. We’ll see )
What are your company priorities for the year ahead?
We are very young and we want to grow. Revenue growth is our primary focus and our strategy is to invest into startups by development mainly. We also believe in sustainability of the product quality so we make an effort to be the best. And we are thinking of cutting the majority of our direct costs by applying certain rationalizations in the DevOps area, dockerizing our apps and the apps of our clients, implementing CI/CD.
Cybersecurity
Oleksandr Smychnikov, Business Consulting Director at 10Guards
Tell us about your company and yourself.
10Guards is a business consulting company working in the cybersecurity field. We are dedicated to provide our customers with services in cybersecurity consulting and white hacking according to the business needs. Such approach helps us to work with customers not only on technical projects, but to become business advisors and build their cybersecurity strategy to support business development.
I am a Head of Consultancy and Delivery team in our company. So, my main interest and duties are related to strategic development of our service portfolio and managing & supervising our consulting projects.
Which technology/language will be on hype in cybersecurity market 2019? Why?
Main focus will be on incident management/response and data privacy/management. All the related technologies will be the most popular in 2019. It will be forced by different local and international regulations enforcement and clarification (such as GDPR or California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and cyberattacks increasement. All efforts will be focused on attack prevention, after-attack investigation and recovery.
What trends should we watch to be up-to-date in the cybersecurity industry?
That’s about SOCs, incident response teams and main experts in the topic. It will be useful to obtain some international associations membership. Usually, such entities have strong and resourceful repositories and newsfeeds to watch current trends in software development.
If you were about to invest money in 2019, what project would you choose and why?
I am interested in everything about data privacy and consumer privacy. That’s partially because of my personal interest, and moreover, it will be more and more necessary for corporate business to manage this data efficiently and in compliance with all regulations and laws.
How do you see cybersecurity market in Ukraine in 2019?W What should companies expect?
I hope it will be a year of cybersecurity. The companies will suffer from attacks. And those, who think they are safe at the moment, will understand security necessity and will start projects to implement it. That will be shift of thinking for our business.
What are your company priorities for the year ahead?
We will continue our way. Our aim is to grow our Ukrainian market and to expand our presence to the EU. We are sure that our experience will help our country to be more secure and safe, as it will grow our business outside the country also.
Web Development
Kos Chekanov, Co-founder at Artkai
Tell us about your company and yourself.
My name is Kos Chekanov. I’m the co-founder of Artkai, a UX-focused design & development agency that gets business.
We founded Artkai four years ago to change the design services in Ukraine. There were two things we wanted to concentrate on:
- UX as scientific approach = design that helps business increase profits;
- Client Service as a must = making satisfied customers our long-term partners.
It was something obvious for us. Something that totally makes sense if you want to have a successful service company. It appeared that our approach was attractive to a lot of foreign companies and we’ve been lucky to collaborate with clients from 28 countries. We’ve completed over 90 projects for them.
The cherry on the top is that our clients tell we are fun to work with. Which I think is a big deal when we talk about outsourcing 😉
Which technology/language will be on hype in web/mobile design 2019? Why?
There will be definitely more demand for AR & VR. These technologies have survived the fall due to the unreadiness of people to adopt it. Now, when headsets become more mobile, and projects like Adverty disrupt advertising market, the software development trend goes up.
I believe that more companies will be competing in the new dimension. And there are enormous opportunities for designers to create the new normal in this market.
I also believe that we are going to witness the rise of the voice-first design. Siri, Alexa, and other industry leaders make this technology our everyday companion. In fact, 35.6 million Americans used a voice-activated assistant at least once a month in 2017. And the whole world is catching the trend.
Companies will compete for creating personalities with well-thought-out UX. So, there will be more interfaces without screens.
What trends should we watch to be up-to-date in web and mobile design industry?
It’s getting more and more difficult to impress clients with just fancy images. Dribbble-like shots became an Instagram with projects that mostly exist only in the imagination of their creators.
In my opinion, there’s a new trend in software development – UX-researching. Some companies combine design & research in one person and there are those who separate these two job titles. Yet, we see the course of adding more value to UX design and to the projects’ results consequently.
Of course, screens will stay here. People buy more frameless gadgets like iPhone 10 or Galaxy 9. So, designers will be looking for new ways of making the interaction frictionless. Perhaps, we’ll see new ways of combining voice & gestures in interfaces.
If you were about to invest money in 2019, what project would you choose and why?
It’s a tough question. I would surely invest in the products that my team would like to create.
How do you see web and mobile development/design market in Ukraine in 2019? What should companies expect?
As the outsourcing and IT staffing market continues to grow, I predict that the competition will make companies concentrate more on the world trends that were uncovered by McKinsey:
- Measuring and driving design performance with the same precision as revenues and costs.
- Breaking down internal walls between physical, digital, and service design.
- Making user-centric design everyone’s responsibility.
- De-risking development by continually listening, testing, and iterating with end-users.
Furthermore, clients will demand more attention to their works and in this case, sending files once in a while will not be sufficient anymore. Designers will need to go on site to clients to conduct researches, interviews and design workshops. So, more designers will need to enhance their communication skills.
What are your company priorities for the year ahead?
The purpose of Artkai is building interfaces that make sense to business. Thus, the primary goal for my company would be strengthening our skills in business analytics and data-driven design consultancy.
We will nurture our design people and empower them in cross-functional teams that take collective accountability for improving the user experience while retaining the functional connections of their members.
We will also combine design with coding, providing full-scale development in Javascript ecosystem.
Finally, we will continue work with our clients in rapid pace. We will iterate, test, and learn rapidly consolidating insights from the prototype until long after the final launch.
Software Development
Anton Vityaz, Engagement Manager at Infopulse
Tell us a little about your company and yourself.
I am an Engagement Manager at Infopulse Ukraine. My responsibilities are focused on building enterprise business applications. Most of my projects were related to development on the Microsoft platform, but there are also some customer web and mobile solutions.
Infopulse is a subsidiary of EVRY A/S, a large Nordic IT group, and an international vendor of services in such fields as Software R&D, Application Management, Cloud & IT Operations, and Cybersecurity. The company houses over 1,900 specialists. It has established its presence in 10 countries across Europe. Infopulse is proud of its customer brands, such as Bosch, British American Tobacco, Citrix, Credit Agricole, ING Bank, Gorenje, METRO Cash & Carry, Microsoft, Mondelēz, OTP Bank, SAP, VEON, Vodafone, and many others.
Which technology (language) will be on hype in tech 2019? Why?
We see growing attention to the Intelligent Apps and Analytics, more development for wide area of Intelligent Things related to the Internet-of-Things, from very trivial home gadgets to the self-driving cars. In our portfolio, we can trace such trends in software engineering like more BI and Big Data, more projects related to the digital services for automotive industry, as well as developments in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, including Machine Learning, Computer Vision, and Face Recognition.
What trends should we watch to be up-to-date in the IT industry?
More usability, more intelligence, growing volumes of collected and analyzed data in almost every IT field. Deep knowledge of structural and behavioral models help us understand specific customer needs and act proactively, do more thing autonomously. Bringing more digitalization into our life, we inevitably have to increase our digital protection. Personal data security, including our inner feeling of safety whether online, at home, or in a self-driving car will increasingly depend on digital products quality and security.
If you were about to invest money in 2019, what project would you choose and why?
Future trends make focus on self-driving vehicles, intelligent services which give more feedback to understand and predict human behavior. Food, medicine and biotechnology will be always in demand. Investments in these areas will be more cost-efficient than speculative hypes of any other virtual products.
How do you see IT market in Ukraine in 2019? What should companies expect?
Customers aspire to more digital services, better operational services and better communications in all channels. At this moment, many Ukrainian banks fail in terms of usability; only few can provide rich digital services for customer self-service. Even market leaders cannot adopt all types of services; they still require a lot of manual operation to run the business. There is a number of challenges associated with the customer service, and there is much of customer frustration related to the human factor, old processes and limited usability of digital services. All these challenges will lead banks to focus on better usability, better digital services, integration and customer self-service for web, mobile and instant messengers.
What are your company’s priorities for the year ahead?
There are plenty of them. To start with, among our priorities I see expanding our presence at local and foreign markets as well as strengthening our partnership with the key tech vendors, such as Microsoft and SAP. We will keep improving our competences in development of solutions for Automotive, Telecom, Banking & Finance industries. Also, building deeper collaboration with our customers on their way to digital transformation and migrating to the cloud, extending the range of our services and solutions in these areas. We make a special emphasis on growing our portfolio of IT Security solutions and our expertise in Enterprise Compliance Management. And of course, we are enhancing our activity in decentralized systems, IoT, Big Data, AI and Data Science.
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