This article in Computing describes how Fintech startup Orwell Group intends to reduce the costs associated with entering new markets using Open Banking APIs to access account data and then distribute that data streaming tech called Kafka, but until PSD2 defines how APIs will be managed and updated defining a streaming service may be premature:
“The technical requirements are no less stringent. Data transfers must be secure, fast, flexible and compliant. Bespoke services also need to be quick to prototype and deploy so that a bank can try the service and make changes before going ahead. In development terms, this points to Agile and DevOps and core to operational agility is streaming technology.
“We don’t use any databases operationally,” said head of engineering Gian Marco Cabiato (pictured, left), of the company’s payment service.
“We don’t store any account information in a database. It’s streamed and we store the ledger itself in Kafka. When we don’t have anything more to do with the data we store it in a Hadoop datalake.”
The use of data streaming is very important, Caldeira explained, because it allows for extremely rapid processing times
“If you are holding state in a database you can only change that state maybe 200 times a second. In our case, it’s been tested at about 300,000 times a second, which is a corporate scenario. Let’s say you’re paying thousands of salaries. We can do that in a few seconds whereas a typical bank batch job would be five of six hours or most likely overnight.”
Streaming also makes monitoring and interacting with transactions much more proactive he added. “Rather than waiting for a batch to complete we can monitor everything in real-time.”
Not everything is done through streaming though. The company also uses MariaDB and Scylla to hold reference data for more traditional transaction types. “We want to keep all our options open,” said Cabiato.”
Overview by Tim Sloane, VP, Payments Innovation at Mercator Advisory Group
Read the quoted story here
