Right line
How Right line, a major banking software developer, adopted Pachca after leaving Slack
About the company
I'm Mikhail, head of infrastructure at Right line. We build digital solutions for banks and have been on the market for more than 10 years. Our services are used by more than 30 banks in Russia, and 4 of the top 10 work with us.
In 2019, we became the first certified vendor for Russia's Faster Payments System (SBP), which was starting to connect Russian banks. Since 2023, we've been part of the Digital Ruble project: the first transactions with the new form of the national currency are already running on our solution. 10 of the 30 banks in the Digital Ruble pilot work with us.
Life before Pachca
Before Pachca, we used Slack. A few years ago, we decided to switch to Russian software and started looking for alternatives. At first, our goal was to adopt an open-source team chat app, and at the time we were looking at about 5 solutions: testing and comparing them. Each had its quirks, and we could see that every one of them would need customization and maintenance on our side. As the team grew, that work would only pile up (we'd seen it happen to our colleagues at banks).
Broadly, we had 2 options: go with something paid and cloud-based, or take an open-source product and build on it ourselves. We took an honest look at our capacity and decided we didn't want to spend that many resources and that much time on open source, so we looked at what interesting cloud solutions were on the market. We settled on Pachca right away. Our HR director recommended it.
We compared it with other services on the market and used it in trial mode for 3 months. It met every one of our key criteria. Having threads was especially important to us.
The only thing that gave us pause back then was how young the product was and that we didn't know the brand. But we decided to move, hoping the team would keep developing the product and add all the missing features. Several years later, we can see our hopes paid off. Pachca is growing very actively, and our biggest compliments go to the team for that.
The moment we knew Pachca was the one
After a 3-month "probation period" with Pachca, we ran internal surveys, and the whole team said they were ready to give up Slack and move everything to Pachca. We believe decisions like this shouldn't be made by a few individuals but by the whole team, since everyone will have to work in the new app.
How Pachca changed the way we communicate
First, probably, cross-chat threads. They were hard to get at first. In Slack, an @mention in a thread was just a way to highlight someone's profile without typing their last name. In Pachca, it can "summon" the right person into the thread, even if they weren't there before. Once we understood how it all works and came up with our own use cases, it turned out to be really convenient. Now you don't have to keep copying and forwarding messages or bringing someone up to speed if they're not in the thread. Just @mention them and they'll read everything themselves.
Second, we reworked and cut down the number of chats, and we now run them more deliberately. Every chat has an admin who moderates the conversation (making sure all discussions of specific questions happen in threads).
We also make heavy use of internal bots, which really speed up our workflows. We're even thinking about bringing on a dedicated developer for bots in Pachca. For example, our hiring processes used to be partly manual, and now we've moved them into Pachca. When a new employee is starting, HR gets a request in a chat and fills out all the details in a custom form: who's responsible for onboarding, which system access is needed, the office workspace, the equipment to provide and so on. The request then goes to the relevant employees in the reminders section, and HR can see its status. It used to be all manual: HR collected the information, put together and sent an email, then followed up on the status. There are many examples like this in other processes too, from booking desks and meeting rooms to critical infrastructure tasks.
Tips for making the switch
When moving to Pachca, it's best to put together a small group of people who will own the move. Most importantly, each of them should believe in the move and see it as the right call, with no doubts that it's needed. Otherwise, the result will be negative. You can get there by talking to teams one on one, explaining the benefits or sharing guides with examples.
As for preparing the service, analyze your entire workspace: see what chats and bots you have, which ones you need and how hard it will be to move or rewrite them for the new service. If needed, you can use the Slack import. Then set up the workspace so your colleagues walk into a chat structure that already makes sense.
