If you were building a next generation bank account platform today what would the technology need to look like to be truly transformational, truly “next-generation”? Ask a software architect or even an AI engine what the principles of a modern digital banking platform are and the response is clear and consistent: Cloud native with an immutable database; High performance and scalable; Connecting through standards with open access and extensibility; and make it secure.
To understand each of these concepts using some simple analogies:
Cloud Native: Why own your own power-station?
Just as power is provided through commodity provision so are computers. Hosting solutions on-premise is becoming increasingly costly and difficult. Data volumes have increased exponentially in recent times and for organisations like banks building infrastructure to cope with the potential high-demand events is a costly and risky proposition.
Cloud providers offer cost effective commodity solutions that increase resilience and provide the ability to flex to meet high volume demand. A modern solution needs to be built on the technology stack that can take advantage of what the cloud can offer.
Immutable Database: Everything there ever was!
Traditional databases separate the data from the audit and the audit is often left incomplete. In an immutable database the data – a complete log of everything that ever happened – is the audit. The audit can never be incomplete which ensures data integrity and transparency. Data models can be constructed from this audit trail allowing for easy adaptation to changing use cases.
High Performance through Scalability: Don’t make your cashiers faster, add more cashiers!
If the only way to get more people through your supermarket is to make your cashiers faster then ultimately you have a performance problem. A truly scalable solution can add the equivalent of an infinite number of cashiers by simply adding hardware to deliver massive performance. This provides the ability to take on the most demanding use cases in terms of complexity or transaction throughput.
Standards Driven: Standing on the shoulders of giants
The industry has spent the last twenty years building the ISO20022 payments and cash management model. It’s the best we have so let’s use it – the lingua-franca of financial services. Connectivity to customers, providers and those we provide services to is simple when we all speak the same language.
Open APIs: How computers use computers
Combined with the use of standards, providing a rich set of APIs enables easy real-time connectivity for customers and their clients by enabling ready integration between systems. This ability to build and connect to new applications on top of the platform also allows users and customers to automate tasks currently undertaken by humans while reducing double handling and the opportunity for error.
Extensible: Not everything can be designed in advance
Solutions should be built on a platform principle. Applications currently unknown or at least not well specified will want to take advantage of the platform capabilities by utilising them (through APIs) or extending them through data models. This provides the ability to build new applications or incorporate third party applications on top of the core platform to meet evolving use cases, market demands and future trends.
Security: Trust no-one
Make security a priority across authentication, encryption, access controls, auditing capabilities, and infrastructure. Take a “zero-trust” approach.
Floe: Faster, flexible, frictionless corporate banking
Floe is a cloud native, composable and extensible application that can build on existing legacy solutions to provide a modern, real-time, digital corporate banking platform. Solutions include client monies, virtual account management across cash and digital currencies, embedded bank accounts, in-house banking, and banking-as-a-service offerings all re-invented through Floe.
Designed and developed to the principles outlined above, Floe is a next-generation bank account platform:
- Cloud Native: Floe is cloud-native but also considers on-premises deployments in environments where cloud deployment is not possible or approved. It uses Kubernetes for automated deployment, scaling, and management, providing flexibility and ease of deployment. Support for Google Kubernetes Engine and Google Anthos ensures compatibility with both public cloud and on-premises environments.
- Immutable Database: Floe uses Kafka as the principal data repository, ensuring a complete and immutable audit trail of every event ever processed. This approach aligns with the principle of an immutable database, providing transparency and data integrity.
- High Performance and Scalability: Floe leverages high-performance, real-time technologies and borrows from established patterns in stream and event-driven systems. Stateless microservices, event-driven architectures, and horizontal scaling ensures that the platform is designed to scale without affecting live traffic.
- Standards Driven: Floe follows the standards-driven approach by using ISO20022 as the native interface to external systems. Even when ISO20022 is not available within the bank, Floe employs a customizable integration layer to interface with internal bank systems. This adherence to standards simplifies communication, reduces integration complexity and accelerates time-to-market for new services.
- Open APIs: Floe provides a set of APIs that give banks and customers control over various aspects of its capabilities, from customer onboarding to account activity introspection. GraphQL is used as the query language for these APIs, offering flexibility and rich capabilities for application development on top of the platform.
- Extensibility: Floe publishes data models for customer, account, and transaction data held within Kafka, enabling analytics and insights into client behaviours.
- Security: Developed to ISO27001 standards, security is built into the application through encryption of data both at rest and in transit. A complete and immutable audit trail supports enhanced fraud detection.
- Real-time: The Floe platform sits on a fundamental concept of real-time processing through event-streaming and in-memory computing to ensure that whatever the constraints of the systems it works with, once in Floe everything is real-time.
Floe’s technical architecture represents a modern approach to banking, emphasizing data integrity, immutability, and scalability. By utilising Domain-Driven Design, Bounded Context and the core concepts of event-sourcing, event-driven, and command-driven processes, Floe provides a scalable, efficient, and secure banking solution that meets the evolving needs of customers in the digital age. With Floe, the future of banking is built on a solid foundation of reliability and performance, ensuring that banking services can keep pace with the dynamic demands of the digital age.