By: Robert Bisewski
robert.bisewski@thinklogicly.com
Compared to Silicon Valley standards, FinTech is conservative, including infrastructure and backend code, often running on the paradigms of the early 2000’s. With slow, complicated, and manual processes, this is not good for all parties involved.
Rising costs, lack of qualified staff due to incredibly competitive job markets, and recent events such as COVID-19 has forced the FinTech industry to innovate. These organizations have been looking for alternatives to the traditional paradigms.
In hopes of moving the needle and making a meaningful impact on their business while exceeding customer expectations, companies can deliver efficiency, agility and scalability through the Cloud.
With FinTech projected to grow at a 23.84% compound annual growth rate through 2025, it’s not surprising to see more firms embracing Cloud initiatives.
Borrowing ideas from start-ups in other industries is now the new norm; in particular, what feature-rich, online Cloud platforms can offer. These offer an IT team:
- self-service and simpler data management
- high standard security
- effortless way to scale up alongside demand
- straightforward regulatory compliance and best practices
- built-in disaster-recovery and/or backup functionality
The Cloud has transformed how software developers think about technology and the way in which people interact with each other. It has equipped developers and designers with powerful tools for creating apps and services. Adopting a cloud infrastructure has also given companies the opportunity to continue with their processes within a hybrid work environment.
Cloud vendors such as Amazon Web Service (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) can be used to quickly bring up the new infrastructure, which is great for those looking to expand operations. Empowering companies with the capability of faster hardware and networks through convenient virtual machines moves business forward. This also enhances the ability to better harness their existing backend data systems from high reliability databases.
Amazon proudly displays many testimonials to persuade potential clients using its tag line: build with confidence on the most secure, compliant, and resilient cloud. The same goes for Google, for that matter, but the most important take-away is that a great deal of people in the FinTech space are rapidly embracing this change.
One such example is the Amazon Relational Database Service. It’s more than just a database; it offers complete lifecycle management, including:
- scale up and down to meet requirements, and with a single click
- convenient firewall rules, to restrict who can and cannot access it
- at-rest encryption
- multi-region redundancy, to provide High Availability
- daily backups of all data
- restore to a previous snapshot at the touch of a button
In fact, most Cloud platforms offer features with this level of functionality by default, often at no extra cost.
Taking advantage of these new architectures also benefits the broader ecosystem: a company may have the ability to host its own backend code, but traditionally such work resulted in the consumption of massive resource hours used to create and maintain such a system. A notable consequence is in the realm of security.
Historically, nearly all companies treat security as almost an after-thought, with predictable results. Criminal activity online, like hacking, has become a profitable business and is more common than ever.
Cloud solves this rather complicated dilemma of “time spent building features” vs “time spent ensuring system is foolproof” by offloading the responsibility to Amazon or Google since this is built-in within the platforms which use and enforce best practices. In some cases, neither dedicated staff nor security analyst is needed.
In keeping up with current market needs and trends, the Cloud offers a peace of mind with the ability of meeting a company’s regulations around compliance and effective security measures.
For those working in FinTech, anticipate these sea changes and don’t be the last to see it. Competitors in this space are developing an architecture centered around the Cloud in collaboration with these vendors to ensure offerings have the flexibility to meet the expectations of their clients. As such, many firms are already reaping tremendous benefits from this new Cloud-native design philosophy.
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To connect about media inquiries or to discuss the article, please email Robert at: robert.bisewski@thinklogicly.com.
