The transformation of the monolithic architecture to microservices architecture is one of the most heroic steps that you might take to upswing your business. So, if you are really looking forward to scale your infrastructure and also speed up while deflecting high supervision costs then microservices is the right solution.
Especially, in a FinTech ecosystem that is running to establish itself in the digital centric world. And this being the reason that they are experimenting their digital approaches with highly scalable, flexible, and efficient architectures for their infrastructures. To get an outcome of performing well in the competition; and also satisfying and solving their customers’ issues.
The outmost benefit of Microservices Architecture is its capability to provide flexibility, structural scalability, and reduced costs. The Monolithic structure has often failed when you want to scale your architecture. And since, financial services can never remain constant there is always scope to extend its capabilities as the world is changing.
The long before financial institutions have legacy systems that carry the baggage of centralized database that are tightly coupled sub system. Microservices give them an approach to separate database from every services. Whenever a new service or a feature is deployed in an infrastructure or product then it has its own separate database and this way entire system doesn’t get affected. The architecture offers solution to fetch the only required data belonging to a specific service. The service reflects through an endpoint or a middleware platform, implying that a large scale service can be implemented with No SQL database for heavy scenarios.
Example of a real life Bank with Monolithic architecture:
Danske Bank worked on the monolithic architecture that mostly relied on the sharing of the resources and therefore the processes couldn’t function independently. The major issue with the monolithic architecture was its scalability and maintainability. Their system wasn’t componentized and shared software libraries. Also monolithic architecture has stack dependencies that stops the embedment of the latest technologies. Additionally, with this architecture banking application had the fear of sending over unencrypted data of the users.
Monolithic application involves huge and complex code, making the response time of a web application high, and also, unacceptable.
And as the web service coincides with the monolith ecosystem, they have a greater downtime and are unavailable each time there is an integration or upgradation of new feature in the application. Which states that the B2B dependency on the application can further complicate decision-making.
Example of a real life Fintech organization having Microservice architecture:
Monzo Bank, a London Based bank uses microservices architecture to build a mobile first U.K digital bank. It has established a cloud native mobile-first digital bank while also complying with regulations. It has the technology foundation that can provide what all the traditional banks cannot with an additional cloud enabled advantage.
Monzo uses AWS hosting for its core banking needs to enable scalability and flexibility with its cloud computing strength, also eliminating the doubts in terms of capacity, infrastructure, and provisioning management.
Monzo has established its core banking systems from scratch with the help of microservices architecture, with multiple virtualized servers having container tools such as Docker and Kubernetes. It architecture makes a hub of small elements that can scale as an entity, communicate synchronously or asynchronously, and have APIs. Their banking application also has a platform-agnostic for easy interoperability.
Outcome of adopting such a system
Monzo runs on an active data centre that avoid any failures or downtime attached to their banking application
Its AWS hosting offers sophisticated security, auditability, and encryption levels to remain compliant with the banking regulations.
Their customer experience is powered by technology making them, by far the most significant is customer centricity; elevating and enhancing their infrastructure according to the competitive landscape for FinTech organizations today.
Their core banking system has a technology architecture that is open, agnostic, scalable, secure, and 3rd Platform–enabled.
As a startup it always had the advantage to develop its infrastructure from scratch and be totally cloud driven. From the very start they understood that simple computation won’t take them out of the firewall but rather give them a data driven and secure architecture that can totally redesign their system’s infrastructure.
The biggest benefit Monzo has gained from microservices is organisational flexibility, Suhail Patel, Monzo’s backend engineer explained this by quoting –
“We build services which are granular enough to be easily understood. Ownership of services is well-defined but can be fluid based on the goals of the company. Monzo has grown significantly over the past 24 months; the structure of existing teams and emergence of new teams has changed significantly as a result.”
Benefits of inducing Microservices in financial institutions
There are considerable advantages that microservices can provide with a robust IT strategy that is sufficient for smooth transition.
Transmission and redeployment of new application features without fear of failing the entire application.
Increased agility and decoupled release cycles implying app updates can be developed and deployed within hours.
With microservices architecture the infrastructure can be easily replicated and can be more effectively help in scaling growth in terms of users and transaction volumes.
As database is much less interdependent, microservices can level down failure footprint.
Microservices architecture makes banking application easier to refactor or replace going forwards.
As microservices can be easily replicated it can help increase structural scalability.
Microservices architecture helps provide improved security levels in the application this way the threats do not breach the entire app and the other elements can left protected.
Microservices Architecture – Ideal platform for Platform Banking
Microservice architecture provides accelerated integration with the third parties and efficiency in the process, which proves to be a major competitive factor in the platform banking ecosystem. The traditional banking system that goes with the monolithic approach has multiple points of integrations and batch processing which is highly inefficient and slows the entire process. And the microservices architecture can bring in a phased approach that minimises risk with a deliberate process in the near-term and long-term objectives. Each element can be developed, updated, and managed independently, making microservices based applications easier to work on and maintain.
To Conclude
Banks and Financial Institutes must adopt microservices architecture in order to create and enter new markets, and also establish themselves rightly to gain all the profits that a new market can offer. With the platform banking the FinTech industry will not only introduce new sources of revenue, but also present enhanced customer experience along with the improved operational efficiency reciprocating a lot of margin.
Also, in the long-term, banks and financial institutes must move to a more sophisticated microservices based core platform in coordination with service mesh. Banks are currently trying to develop a marketplace that should have a microservices platform providing and scaling banking services as individual stacks categorized by product domains.
Consider this example, an organization owner can develop a marketplace that can combine industry leading onboarding services from a fintech with its inhouse underwriting capabilities and book the receivables to a third party bank. And also a customer availing a loan from their platform would be able to protect from the various levels in the back end. Such a composition can be executed effectively only with a microservices-based architecture.
So, the goal of microservices architecture is to help financial institutes and banks align together services from different platforms into unity to offer a unique service to customers.
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