The Challenge
In listing the world’s fastest-growing fintech platforms, Neon faced a critical scalability bottleneck. Their legacy architecture, built on a monolithic WordPress stack, was struggling to handle the surge in concurrent users during peak trading hours. Load times were exceeding 4 seconds, directly impacting user acquisition and trust—currency in the banking world.
“We needed an architecture that didn’t just survive traffic spikes, but thrived in them. Speed was our competitive advantage, and we were losing it.” — CTO, Neon Bank
The objective was clear: Rebuild the core platform from the ground up to support 10M+ users with sub-second latency, while completely redesigning the UI to reflect a Tier-1 financial institution.
The Solution
We deployed a Composable Commerce Architecture, decoupling the frontend from the backend services.
1. Headless Core
We utilized Sanity.io as a headless CMS, allowing the marketing team to deploy campaigns instantly without engineering bottlenecks. This data was fed into a high-performance Astro frontend.
2. Edge Computing
By deploying to the Edge, we pushed logic closer to the user. Global latency was reduced by 60% as static assets were served from the nearest CDN node, while dynamic personalization happened in milliseconds via serverless functions.
3. Visual Language
We moved away from generic “bank blues” to a stark, high-contrast aesthetic. Dark mode became the default, reducing eye strain for power users and giving the app a premium, “Bloomberg Terminal” feel.
Engineering Impact
The results were immediate and measurable.
- Core Web Vitals: LCP dropped from 4.2s to 0.8s.
- Conversion Rate: A 125% increase in account sign-ups within the first month.
- Developer Experience: Build times reduced from 15 minutes to 45 seconds using Vite.
This project didn’t just fix a speed problem; it repositioned Neon as the technological leader in the neobank space.