Designing cloud-native platforms for scalable financial services and Fintech innovation

The financial industry has been largely dependent on its own private-developed monolithic systems. This traditional enterprise-wide architecture supported small business changes with long release cycles, many months to years of downtime, and a hard-to-understand code. The emerging agile-led fintech startups applying innovative solutions to upper-layer services on top of these legacy systems have outpaced the old-line financial institutions in boom and bust, leading to reduced customer loyalty, especially in risker retail and small business areas, and ultimately to the IPO or bankruptcy of some incumbent players. The incumbent banks have been forced to recreate their own versions of these fintech services with much more functionality, data, and regulation compliance; yet, styles and economics more on par with and compatible with these emerging competitors. The urgency, size, and costs of the changes required, and the likely added future legacy loading because of their achieving these goals through their traditional processes and tools, has led to increasing interest in two solutions that historically have supported these agile startups: cloud-native applications and services and the application of financial industry systems design best practices such as APIs on top of the new and traditional back-end, monolithic and emerging microservice, systems.