Brantum | Software & Marketing Agency

FinTech Legacy

Modernisation + GEO

Full-stack modernisation from monolith to cloud-native — zero downtime migration, 200% organic growth, and position #1 for 15 core commercial keywords.

Project Details

This FinTech client was running a seven-year-old Rails monolith that had become the bottleneck for every product decision. Deployment took four hours and required two engineers. A single database query was causing 12-second page load times during peak usage. Their organic search presence was negligible despite having a genuine content advantage — their team had years of expertise that had never been structured for search or AI discoverability. They needed a technical rebuild and a growth strategy, and they needed them delivered without taking their platform offline.

Brantum was engaged for a 6-month modernisation programme: migrating the monolith to a cloud-native architecture on AWS (ECS, RDS Aurora, ElastiCache, CloudFront) while simultaneously executing a technical SEO and GEO programme that would ensure their new platform launched with search authority, not from a standing start.

DELIVERABLES

INDUSTRY

Project Research

The technical audit identified four critical failure points: the database schema had no indexing strategy (causing the slow queries), the deployment process was manual and error-prone (causing the four-hour deployments), there was no CDN or caching layer (causing the page load times), and the infrastructure was entirely in one availability zone (a single point of failure for a financial services product). Each was addressed in the modernisation roadmap before any new features were built.

The SEO research identified 15 high-commercial-intent keywords where the client's expertise gave them a genuine content advantage but where they had no presence. Competitor analysis showed that the first-page results for all 15 were occupied by content that was thin, generic, and increasingly being replaced by AI-generated answers in Google's AI Overviews. This was the GEO opportunity: authoritative, expertly-written content structured for AI citation would outcompete generic content in both traditional search and AI search simultaneously.

Project Results

The modernisation was completed in 22 weeks with zero user-visible downtime, using a blue/green deployment strategy that allowed full traffic switching without a maintenance window. Post-migration deployment time dropped from four hours to eight minutes. Page load times fell from 12 seconds to under 800ms. Infrastructure cost decreased by 34% due to right-sizing and reserved capacity. The platform has experienced zero unplanned downtime in the nine months since go-live.

The SEO and GEO programme achieved position #1 for all 15 target keywords within 5 months of the new content going live. Organic traffic increased 200% year-on-year. The client's content now appears as a cited source in ChatGPT and Perplexity responses for six of their target topics — reducing their dependence on paid acquisition and giving them a durable competitive moat that their competitors cannot replicate quickly.

Testimonials

What Our
Clients Say

Brantum is the only agency we've found that truly understands both sides. Our engineers love working with them because they speak tech. Our CMO loves them because they drive results.

Sarah K.

CTO, Series A SaaS Startup

We hired three agencies before Brantum. What took six months of back-and-forth between dev and marketing now gets done in six weeks by one team who actually communicates.

James T.

Founder, B2B Platform

Page 5 to position 1 for our core keywords in 4 months — and they shipped our entire v2 product at the same time. One team doing both is a genuine superpower.

Alex R.

CEO, FinTech Startup