Introducing Fintechless
Serverless Platform for Financial Institutions and Fintechs
Reading through last year’s McKinsey’s Global Banking Annual Review, it is very difficult to ignore the major signs on the walls. Specifically:
3. Continuous innovation and fast go-to-market, leveraging technology and talent
Today’s top performers in providing banking services are valued more like tech firms than banks — a clear sign that banks need to increase their innovation metabolic rate.
Today we are excited to announce that a group of cloud engineers joined forces with a group of banking experts in order to build and open source a new innovative technology called Fintechless Platform. It is our ambition and our main goal to make it The Serverless Platform for Financial Institutions and Fintechs.
Currently in private beta while the team is working to create technical documentation and customer guidelines.
The Challenges
In this article, instead of emphasizing the Fintechless Platform’s features, we would like to focus on what kind of challenges this platform is addressing:
- Support for ISO 20022 Standard
- Faster Go-To-Market through Cloud and APIs
- Better Data Driven Decision Making
- Path to Freedom from Mainframes
ISO 20022
The Federal Reserve Banks announced plans to complete their migration to the ISO 20022 standard for their real-time gross settlement system by the end of 2023. European Central Bank is now in the process to go live with ISO 20022 in November 2022. And other countries around the world, including Singapore, UK and Canada, are aggressively adopting ISO 20022 standard.
CLOUD and APIs
Financial institutions around the globe are already adopting public cloud services from major technology providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Unfortunately, the complexity of legacy systems that are not primarily API based are making the move to the cloud very slow and frustrating.
DATA
Data driven decision making is a fundamental requirement in financial industry and providing the best quality of data is often challenging, to say the least. Companies are finding that migrating and/or synchronizing data from on-prem environments to the cloud is resource intensive and time consuming. Among common challenges, customers are reporting lack of infrastructure and proper tools, poor quality or siloed data, as well as not knowing how to discover and/or use actionable data points.
MAINFRAMEs
Banks, credit unions and other financial institutions across the world still own and maintain tons of mainframes that they would love to modernize, but are usually labeled as too expensive and/or too risky. The path to freedom from mainframes is a necessary investment that the financial industry cannot continue postponing any longer.
Fintechless To The Rescue
Fintechless is designed to provide a set of solutions that deploy and manage serverless components from major cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Financial institutions can install and configure this open source product in their controlled cloud environments. Fintechless exposes an UI portal that allows customers to manage internally ISO 20022 messages, Kubernetes based microservices and workflow driven transactions that sustainably scale across primary and secondary regions.
At install time, Fintechless Platform provisions more than a dozen of cloud native services, including containers compute and registry, code repository and pipelines, storage and databases, networking and security, etc. At deploy time, financial institutions can configure and customize their own enabled ISO 20022 messages, custom tailored business logic and acceptable technical limitations. At runtime, Fintechless Platform responds within milliseconds to ISO 20022 messages / requests and provides user driven interfaces to operate, manage and monitor everything in one place, as well as integrate with other 3rd party systems by leveraging Fintechless APIs or public cloud native APIs.
In a nutshell, Fintechless Platform simplifies customers experience by taking the common technical overhead and abstracting the heavy lifting away, which helps financial institutions to focus on what makes their financial systems different and competitively unique. Fintechless, as an open source software, offers much needed transparency, availability and support of a growing community eager to help our financial industry to modernize and innovate.
Final Thoughts
Fintechless is an open source platform that simplifies orchestration and management of public cloud resources required to support globally scalable low latency financial systems powered by ISO 20022 messages. Our big dream and main goal is to make this open source project The Serverless Platform for Financial Institutions and Fintechs. If you’d like to learn more, please feel free to reach out over Email, Twitter or LinkedIn.
