Every month a meetup @ OpenValue

That's not a goal in itself. But definitely fun. It's something that happened automatically because we focus on sharing knowledge. In our case this results in a lot of talks at conferences and meetups. And...we like it a lot if people attend our talks. That's why we're sharing a report of the talks from our latest meetup. So you get an idea of why you don't want to miss these kind of talks and should attend our next meetup!

Talk 1: How to catch a money launderer

Mireille Lock from OpenValue explained one of the ways in which the FIOD is fighting financial crime. Money laundering is an example of this. And something that is complex to detect; especially due to technological innovations used by launderers. For instance: what if people send bitcoin through radio waves – how do you detect that?

Mireille is working at the FIOD where her team tries to keep up with these innovations by building smart applications that can detect irregularities in money flows. When Mireille started on her project she got the opportunity to actually build an environment from scratch.

She and her team first set up a microservices architecture based on a Kubernetes cluster that runs Kafka, Python, Spring boot and React based applications. They now directly use data retrieved from diverse sources. This data doesn't really follow a standard, so the FIOD needs to prepare it first. Her team has now built an application based on Elastic search and Spring boot that helps a lot in this process. The raw data is stored in Minio, which is S3 compliant.

FIOD investigators use the application to create graphs and insights that help to quickly grasp what's going on. What's really useful is categorisation of data by using: data science, Word2Vec and smart python based algorithms. Word2Vec basically enables the linking of related data through vectors. Another way to detect possible fraud is by storing data in a graph database. FIOD uses Neo4J for this. In this context Keylines helps to label the data and place it in the graphs. You can quickly see connections between entities this way.

FIOD is now definitely able to get smart insights a lot faster than before. Criminals, certainly launderers, watch out ;-)

Talk 2 Multi themed Angular Design System

During the second talk Daniel Wedema showed how de Volksbank built a multi themed Angular design system that uses one front end codebase that rolls out to multiple layouts for different brands.

He started by setting the stage: de Volksbank consists of a family of 5 different business units, all separate brands within the bank. Instead of working on 5 different code bases, the challenge was to build an application once and apply label-specific branding with tooling. The "battle of the brands" is fought out by the UX teams – they do all graphical design for the different brands.

A central component in de Volksbank's front-end architecture is "The Guide" – an in-house built documentation system and demo site of reusable components. It's basically a searchable collection of building blocks for front-end applications. Each component in The Guide is documented, has a working demo, contains examples for TypeScript code and HTML templates and shows how to mock the relevant back-end services.

The Guide allows switching between different layouts, so you can see how the component looks and behaves for each brand. Besides serving as a documentation system, it is also a stand-alone application that you can use to develop components on your local machine, and an index that shows where and how a component is used by other projects. Extensive mocking is included and configurable: you can configure the mock backend to return an error response to test the component's behavior in case of an error, for example. 

The Guide was initially written for AngularJS and moved to Angular 2.x when it came out. De Volksbank created a wrapper around the Angular CLI to extend it with functionality like bundling the app and running white box and black box tests. The core components are developed by a core team that supports the product teams.

This approach allows de Volksbank to productively build multi-brand front-end applications using a single code base with a high level of code reuse. Impressive! 

Let's meetup!

Interesting talks right? Now you understand that it is a no brainer to attend our next meetup. Subscribe at https://www.meetup.com/OpenValue/

See you soon!