Behind every partnership that stands the test of time, there are people, decisions, and moments built through decisions made under pressure, ways of working developed over time, and trust earned along the way.

Over five years, Accesa and Atruvia have worked together across many projects, each one shaped by the teams behind it. This is one of them.

In late 2021, a small Accesa team started to work alongside Atruvia's internal developers to migrate outdated legacy applications onto a single unified platform before legacy infrastructure was switched off.

The stakes were high: the deadline was fixed, daily operations for thousands of users could not be disrupted, and two organisations that had never worked side by side had to find a shared way of working together. The migration was completed without disrupting daily operations, and what began as a time-pressured project became the foundation of a collaboration that has grown steadily ever since.

The early months were careful and structured. Requirements arrived as tickets, documentation was limited, and the two teams connected through bi-weekly technical syncs. Developers spent significant time navigating custom frameworks to build an understanding of the platform and both sides recognised that the next step in the collaboration would need to bring both teams closer together.

After almost a year of working together, with both teams building their understanding of the platform and finding their ways of working together remotely, the Accesa team visited Atruvia for a workshop, walking through the full architecture together and explaining how services connected across the larger system.

"Once we understood how the larger system was actually built, everything clicked," recalls Zsolt Turani, who had started as a frontend developer and was by then Technical Lead. "Before that, we were working inside a black box. After, we were working as part of something." That meeting shifted the dynamic between the two teams.

Accesa moved from executing specifications to contributing more actively to the implementation process, bringing technical input and ideas into discussions. Atruvia, in turn, found value in that approach and from there, the way of working between the two teams continued to develop.

From that point, daily collaboration became the mechanism through which the partnership grew.

Monthly technical calls between the engineering teams created a dedicated space for knowledge exchange, where team members from both sides clarified questions and developed a shared way of approaching technical challenges. Bi-weekly functional calls with shared written agendas kept product and delivery aligned. Sprint reviews gave both sides a shared space to assess what had been built and agree on what came next. These were small habits, but over time they became a way of working that brought results.

Over five years, the collaboration continued to evolve as new people joined on both sides. Each transition brought time to align and rebuild shared context, but the ways of working that had been established over the years made it easier to pick up and move forward.

"As the team grows or something changes, we continuously adapt" says Cristina Cristian-Kocsis , Senior Project Delivery Manager for 5 years in the project, currently also Tribe Lead at Accesa. "That has been true for both sides throughout."

That adaptability produced a shift that took years to arrive and that both teams recognise as significant. As the Accesa team earned the trust of their colleagues at Atruvia, there were more and more opportunities to contribute actively to the implementation, with technical input becoming a natural part of how the work moved forward. "There was a moment when our recommendations became input the team could act on," says Florin Iuonas, who joined the Accesa team as Product Owner. "That was a turning point for the partnership." Looking back, the Atruvia team saw it the same way:

One of the clearest signs of progress was those monthly technical calls, once essential for the Accesa team to navigate a system they were still learning, were now resolved through a shared support channel, between engineers who knew each other's work well enough to move without frequent meetings. The calls that had once kept things moving became less necessary because the teams had built enough trust to work without them.

As the scope grew, Atruvia restructured internally to make working together easier and more effective, assigning dedicated product owners and business analysts to the Accesa team.

It was evidence of the trust that had developed between the two teams, one that gave the Accesa team more space to take more responsibility and contribute more actively than before.

Five years after the pilot, 29 Accesa specialists work across 4 active projects within Atruvia Hub, nearly three times the size of the team that started in 2021.

The small collaborative habits that helped two teams deliver under pressure have scaled into a partnership model that continues to grow.

"This has been achieved only through the trust we built together. We are constantly reorganising, finding new processes, and seeing what works. That has never stopped, and it is what keeps the partnership moving forward." says Cristina.