Modernising Legacy Credit Platforms for a Malaysian Credit Bureau

The client is a Malaysia-based credit reporting agency providing credit reports, credit information, and credit risk management solutions to individuals and businesses. Its long-lived Java applications ran in production on real credit data but were past end of support, hard to patch, and had almost no automated test coverage. SmartDev embedded a Full-stack Engineer under a T&M model to secure, upgrade, and migrate the platforms to AWS with zero downtime.
Team

2 Headcounts (1 Full-stack Engineer, 1 Project Manager)

Industries

BFSI (Finance)

Products and Services

Credit Manager, MTRNet & ETR Platforms

Timescales

12 Months (Since Nov 2025)

Country

Malaysia

Business Overview

The client is a Malaysia-based credit reporting agency specializing in credit reports, credit information services, and credit risk management solutions for individuals and businesses. Operating in a data-sensitive financial services environment, the company provides essential credit insights that help organizations assess financial credibility, manage lending risks, and make informed business decisions. Its core platforms process real credit data and support critical business operations, making system security, reliability, and uninterrupted service availability essential to maintaining customer trust and operational efficiency.

Over time, the client’s long-running Java applications had become increasingly difficult to maintain and modernize. Several components had reached the end of vendor support, exposing the platforms to potential security vulnerabilities, compatibility challenges, and growing maintenance costs. With minimal automated test coverage, implementing upgrades or infrastructure changes introduced additional risks to system stability and data integrity.

The Challenges

  • Legacy Technology Debt: Long-lived Java applications running in production on real credit data, each on a different technology generation and all past end of support.
  • Fragile Security Patching: Updating a library to close a security hole broke the application instead of fixing it.
  • Zero-Downtime Storage Move: Document storage had to move off local disks and out of the database into AWS without any downtime.
  • Minimal Test Coverage: With almost no automated tests, nobody could tell whether fixing one thing would break another.
  • Recurring Defects: Defects kept getting closed on the symptom and reopening at acceptance testing.

The Solutions

  • Credit Manager – Unified AWS Storage: One shared storage layer so every feature writes to AWS the same way: encryption at rest, retry on network failure, an access log per download, and a 60-second fallback to local disk.
  • Safe, Re-runnable Migration: Flows migrated one at a time; historical data moved by a batch application that tracks its own progress, so it can be re-run without duplicating anything.
  • MTRNet – Platform Upgrade: Upgraded to supported versions rather than patched around, making vulnerabilities fixable – including a data-exposure flaw in the XML upload path, fixed inside the application rather than hidden behind a firewall rule.
  • ETR – Root-Cause Diagnostics: Defects and environment failures traced to their real cause in the code and logs before any fix was written.

Our Technology Stacks

Java
Spring
JSP
React
MySQL

Outcomes

Secure AWS Storage

Credit Manager now stores files on AWS in production with encryption, access logging and a 60-second fallback; the historical migration finished with no downtime.

No High/Critical Findings

MTRNet runs on the upgraded platform at v2.0.0 with no high or critical security findings left; the 247 remaining warnings are maintainability cleanup only, so nothing blocks deployment.

Near-Zero Regression Risk

On ETR, correct diagnosis repeatedly shrank each fix to the layer that was actually wrong, keeping regression risk near zero.

Have ~700 Tests Added

Roughly 700 automated tests, where there had been almost none, now catch regressions during development instead of at acceptance testing.

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