Microservices have become a key ingredient in the successful recipe of a FinTech product. Even conventional financial services have recognized the importance of microservices in their digital transformation journey because microservices can digitize legacy systems of financial service companies and banks by re-architecting apps into newer ones. The popularity of microservices can be understood by the fact that over 37% of IT respondents said they at least “partially” used microservices in 2021, while 34% fully used them. This is almost 25% higher than that in 2020, according to the 2021 Global Survey results of the GitLab DevSecOps report.

Even though microservices involve complexity, monitoring systems, and organizations, the results and benefits of microservices in the FinTech industry are worth the efforts. Microservices can increase productivity by up to 50% and decrease overhead costs by half on average. The idea behind using microservices is simple- making a product that fits the bill of scalability, agility, and a constant change of market scenario- something that’s easier said than done. Age-old monolithic systems are not only difficult to restructure but also burn the pocket.  In this insight, we compile best practices for microservices that will help you build a winning FinTech product.

What Are Microservices?

Microservices are a cluster of interconnected, and still independent frameworks, libraries, and tools which are designed to perform their tasks. They are written to support business goals by using different languages. Microservices are built within smaller, multidisciplinary teams, which makes it easier to deploy, test, and maintain.

Best Practices for Microservices in Fintech

Have Dedicated Infrastructure to Support Business Functions

Addressing vital issues like App security, load balancing, performance, caching, and monitoring is critical. To work on these issues, it is essential to ensure quality cloud computing services or hosting, which can handle traffic load and make the product work.

Go Slow While Migrating a Monolithic App

Monolithic architectures, also known as tight coupled architectures, come with their own set of baggage, such as stack dependencies that do not allow embedding of the latest technologies. Danske Bank, for instance, worked with monolithic architecture that relies mostly on resource sharing. This prevented the bank’s processes from functioning independently. Also, such an architecture may send unencrypted user data, which accounts for a major security breach. Monolithic architectures are not computable with microservices, which is why migration must go slow. The best practice for a financial service or fintech company is to recognize its pain points and know what legacy functionalities it needs for functionality on new architecture.

Automate RESTful APIs

REST APIs are flexible and portable, allowing a company to migrate from one server to another. Also, it helps perform database changes with much flexibility. Having said that, hand-coding customer RESTful APIs for individual microservice in the architecture requires tremendous time and resources. One way could therefore be to include a feature of automatic API generation which converts any database into REST API.

Prioritize Loosely Coupled Architecture

Loosely Coupled Architecture, also known as microservices, is lean, independent, and has a single responsibility principle. This means that each microservice is dedicated to performing one particular function only. Therefore, it makes maintenance, testing, and fault rescue an easier job. Microservices are popular in fintech app development because they can be deployed independently, and also have a lot of business responsiveness due to a clean interface for communication.

Adopt DevSecOps Security Model

We have already discussed fintech API security risks and challenges and a winning security strategy. Adopting the DevSecOps model at the core of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) helps in creating a secure codebase. DevSecOps focuses on embedding security at the early stages of SDLC. This methodology uses cybersecurity as the central part of the production pipeline with other phases like architectural designing, coding, and testing.

Deploy Easily With Containers

Deploying microservices in containers makes migration flexible and portable, while also helping in managing services independently. Container Architecture is popular for deploying microservices for fintech. It comes with several benefits like container-centric infrastructure orchestration, container runtime, container orchestration, self-healing mechanisms, load balancing, and service delivery. Kubernetes application deployment architecture is such an open source platform that is widely used among developers for grouping microservices in the fintech platform.

Introduce Microservices Central Logging

As basic hygiene in microservices, central logging is considered the best practice. It is a must to have a centralized logging location and add sufficient context to logs to identify the difference between useful and useless log data. Microservices central logging enables visibility for debugging issues in a better manner.

Use Case of Microservices in Fintech: Monzo Bank

London-based Monzo Bank uses more than two thousand microservices in its architecture for building its mobile-first, cloud-native digital bank while also being compliant with regulations. The fintech application uses AWS hosting for core banking, leveraging cloud computing strength to derive benefits like flexibility and scalability. Cloud eliminates hiccups around provisioning management, infrastructure, and capacity limits.

The core banking system of Monzo Bank is established on the platform using microservices with virtualized servers that have container tools like Kubernetes and Docker. The architecture of the platform is composed of smaller elements that can scale as an entire entity, including APIs, and communicate synchronously or asynchronously. For easy interoperability, the banking fintech app is platform-agnostic. Monzo Bank’s greatest benefit from microservices architecture is organizational flexibility.

Suhail Patel, the backend engineer of Monzo says, “Monzo is a fully licensed and regulated bank in the UK. We have no physical branches. We've had this API ever since we began. You can manage all of your money and finances within the Monzo app, and the bank has more than 4 million customers in the UK.” He also adds, “We build services which are granular enough to be easily understood. Ownership of services is well-defined but can be fluid based on the goals of the company.”

In Conclusion

Fintech companies and legacy financial service companies must adopt best practices while using microservices to enter new markets and position themselves rightly. With platform banking and new-age banking apps, enhanced customer experience goes a long way. In the long-term, moving to sophisticated microservices architecture-based core MVP, a fintech solution must also coordinate with service mesh. The end goal of microservices architecture in fintech or banking services is to align different services and products from multiple platforms to provide a uniform customer experience.

To know more about the use of microservices in fintech and implementing best practices, let us connect. You may also write to us at hello@valuebound.com.

Google PageRank is an essential factor that Google considers while deciding whether or not your website will show on the top Search Engine Result Pages, also known as SERPs. Appearing on top of search engine listings means that your content is easily seen by the users. While there are other search engines, Google PageRank is a gold standard for your content, and other search engines also follow similar techniques for listings. It not only becomes a significant factor to the popularity of your content but also reaps direct benefit for your product or service. Hence, tracking Google PageRank for keywords is critical analysis that must be done at the organizational level.

Google PageRank

PageRank(PR) is a Google Search algorithm that ranks websites based on how important they are. It was named after the term "web page" and co-founder Larry Page.The more important a website is, the more likely it is that it will get links from other websites.

Monitoring the progress of keywords you want to rank

It becomes a tedious task to repeatedly search for the keywords you want to rank and monitor the progress. There are quite a number of expensive tools to monitor keyword rankings. This can be accomplished by using scraping libraries provided. One such tool is googlesearch, which is a Python library for searching Google, easily. googlesearch uses requests and BeautifulSoup4 to scrape Google.

In this blog, we aim to provide a tutorial on how to get Google pagerank in Google spreadsheet. The arrangement of this kind makes it easier for an organization to track and monitor the progress of their keywords. So let’s begin.

Step 1: Install googlesearch Python Library

To install googlesearch Python Library, run the following command:

python3 -m pip install googlesearch-python

Required Params of the googlesearch: Your basic requirements for googlesearch include-

• query: query string that we want to search for
• lang: Language
• TLD: TLD stands for the top-level domain which means we want to search our results on google.com or google.in or some other domain
• num: Number of result we want
• start: The first result to retrieve
• stop: The last result to retrieve. Use None to keep searching forever
• pause: Lapse to wait between HTTP requests
• Return: Generator (iterator) that yields found URLs

Python code

Follow the code below to move ahead on the process.

Step 2: Google Spreadsheet Settings

Make sure you are following along, you'll need a spreadsheet. Head over to Google Sheets and create one.

Step 3: Create a service account and OAuth2 credentials

Now, you'll need to create a service account and OAuth2 credentials from the Google API Console. Follow the simple steps below to enable the API and grab your credentials.

• Head over to the Google API Console.
• Create a new project by selecting My Project -> + button
• Search for 'Google Drive API', ‘Google Sheets API’ and enable them.
• Head over to 'Credentials' (sidebar), click 'Create Credentials' -> 'Service Account Key'
• Select Compute Engine service default, JSON, hit create.
• Save the JSON file in your system.
• Share your spreadsheet with the "XXX@XXX.gserviceaccount.com" email listed in the JSON file.

Step 4: Operations in Spreadsheet

To access spreadsheets via Google Sheets API you need to authenticate and authorize your application. Follow these steps for the same-

• oauth2client - to authorize with Google Drive API
• gspread - to interact with Google Spreadsheets

Step 5: Install Required Package

After completing the aforementioned steps, now Install required package. You will have to install gspread, oauth2client using the following code-

pip install gspread oauth2client

You can perform insert, fetch, update and delete in the spreadsheet. Let’s say you want to fetch keywords from a spreadsheet and have to update the search ranks corresponding to the keywords (Fig.1)-

 

You have every column name as a keyword in the sheet. You will fetch the keywords and update the corresponding rank to that keyword in below row.
 
Finally, import all required packages as discussed above.

 

To Conclude

Tracking Google PageRank is an essential factor in the process of search engine optimization since it measures the importance of a web page. Relevance of any web page is a critical factor that determines it’s PageRank. But tracking the progress is what matters the most to any organization's SEO efforts. Whether you’re an SEO consultant or an organization tracking the progress of your top rated keywords, a good SEO strategy with right measuring tools can go a long way.

Reach out to us if you have further questions on this tutorial on how to automate Google PageRank for your keywords in a Google spreadsheet. 
 

A resounding 94% of IT company leaders reported they have experienced API security problems in production APIs, the SALT, a leading security research firm that identifies API security vulnerabilities, report highlights. Among the critical API, security problems are vulnerability (47%), authentication (38%), data exposure (31%), and breach (19%) over a period from July 2021 to July 2022. (Fig. 1). Malicious API attack traffic surged 117% over the past year, from an average of 12.22M malicious calls per month to an average of 26.46M calls.

In a global and growing API ecosystem Postman users signed in from an impressive 234 different countries and geographies while making 855 million API requests in the year 2021 (up 56% from the prior year). Speaking specifically of India regarding the Country-by-country API growth, the country is in the third spot for the fastest growing geographies (Fig. 2).

Industry-wise, Technology (29%) represents the largest industry that makes use of APIs, followed by business/IT services (28%), banking/finance/insurance (11%), and healthcare (5%). In our previous blog, we mentioned how API attacks are causing significant security concerns among fintech companies that are heavily reliant on APIs to build applications. The result? Unfortunately, 54% of respondents indicate that they have had to slow the rollout of a new application because of an API security concern.

While the reliance on APIs is pointedly high, still unfortunately only 9% of respondents can confidently state that they have an advanced API security strategy that includes dedicated API testing and protection. Meanwhile, an alarming 61% admit that they lack any API security strategy or have only basic protections. API security is considered the most important component of web application security, but before we dig deeper into the best practices for API security posture, let us first understand what defines Application Programming Interface (API) security.

What is API Security?

Application Programming Interface or API enables software applications to communicate with each other, thus enhancing interoperability, among offering other advantages. API security, therefore, means protecting APIs from vulnerable attacks. Since Application Programming Interface, also called API, is so commonly used among industries now, they also carry sensitive software data and functions, thus becoming bait for attackers.

API security is especially critical for the fintech industry which extensively embraces the API-first philosophy. We have already written a detailed insight about Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) top 10 challenges of API security for fintech companies. This article, therefore, extends further to present several tools, methods, and best practices for securing your APIs.

Architectural Styles Used for Modern APIs: Mitigating Security Risks

Postman’s survey underscores that as many as 94% of its respondents use REST or REpresentational State Transfer as their main architectural style. Some of the other architectural styles used for engineering APIs include webhooks, WebSockets, GraphQL, and SOAP. Among these the most commonly used is also SOAP or Simple Object Access Protocol.

Among specifications, JSON Schema (used by 47%) is the top specification in use, followed by Swagger 2.0 (54%) and OpenAPI 3.0 (40%).

While REST is considered a simpler approach (and therefore most popular) and uses HTTP/S as the transport protocol, it makes use of JSON format for transferring data. SOAP in the meanwhile is the highly structured message protocol to APIs, and supports multiple low-level protocols. Both these types of architectural styles for APIs can support HTTP requests and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). However, the difference lies in the level of security they offer.

SOAP vs REST API: Which is more secure?

Before explaining which of the two- SOAP vs REST APIs architectural styles is more secure, let us first understand the difference through the table below.

	SOAP	REST
Organized in terms of	enveloped message structure	compliance with six architectural constraints
Format	XML only	XML, JSON, HTML, plain text
Learning curve and usage	Difficult	Easy
Preferred for Community	Small	Large
Use cases	Payment gateways, identity management CRM solution, financial and telecommunication services, legacy system support	Public APIs simple resource-driven apps

API security would remain a priority regardless of the architectural approach you choose. While REST is faster and has a simpler learning curve and ease of use than SOAP, the latter is more secure, and here’s why-

Both REST and SOAP use Secured Socket Layer or SSL for data protection during API call requests, but SOAP also supports Web Services Security. This ensures adding a double layer of protection for the API security. In the case of REST, the security must be built-in for deployment, transmission, and interaction with clients.

SOAP is based upon OASIS and W3C recommendations, and includes XML encryption and signatures, and SAML tokens. Meanwhile, REST does not have its own built-in security capabilities, and the security is based on the API itself.

SOAP supports WS-ReliableMessaging that enables built-in error handling, while REST APIs have no in-built error handling and need to resend the data in case of error.

SOAP can support Web Services (WS) specifications, which enables you to use WS-Security kind of extensions. This provides enterprise-grade security for web services. On the other hand, developers’ architectural choice is deploying REST APIs behind API gateway. So, when the clients send requests for gateway connection, it acts as a proxy and does not directly go to the REST API. This poses security concerns that must be addressed by the API gateway.

The technologies associated with APIs that are most commonly preferred now include Microservices (58%) and Kubernetes (50%), followed by containers (46%), serverless architecture (44%), and GraphQL (35%). This brings us to the segment of GraphQL, the query language that describes how clients request information through APIs.

Mitigating GraphQL Security Risks

Some of the strategies that can help pacify the API security risks arising from GraphQL include-

• Timeout: It can help you secure against large query requests. Among the simplest of all strategies, in this case, the server only needs to understand the maximum time set for a query and not the details about incoming queries.
• Maximum Query Depth: Analysis of abstract syntax tree (AST of query document to understand what is acceptable is called the maximum query depth, and it can help in preventing clients from abusing a query depth. GraphQL server can make use of Maximum Query Depth to function requests by either accepting or rejecting them.  
• Query Complexity- It can be used as a strategy to define the complexity level of certain schema fields which may be more complex to compute. By defining query complexity, you can also restrict those queries which do not fit into the complexity threshold bill.
• Throttling- It can be an ideal strategy for stopping clients requesting medium-sized queries. By estimating the required server time for completing each query type, throttling can be done.

API Security Best Practices

For improving the overall API security the following best practices can be implemented-

• Understand and Identify Vulnerabilities- Even while this could be a complex process, the only way one can effectively secure APIs is by understanding the risks at the API lifecycle steps. Organizations, especially fintech companies, must treat APIs as software artifacts that must also pass through the security stage during their own SDLC.
• Access Control- Non-public REST services must perform access control at each API endpoint. Web services in monolithic applications implement this by means of user authentication, authorization logic, and session management. OAuth, the token-based authentication framework, could be a powerful tool for controlling API access. OAuth does not expose user credentials and also completes third-party service requests for information.
• Encrypt Data for Database Security- Sensitive data, especially personally identifiable information or PII- all of which is managed by APIs- must be protected by way of encryption, by also considering regulations and compliance. Data encryption during rest, and also in transit, with the help of Transport Layer Security (TLS) can ensure that attackers do not compromise with API servers.
• Consider Anti-DoS Approach- With denial of service (DoS) attacks becoming primary in API security leak, it's necessary to involve different profiles within your organization to assess the actual situation and to apply countermeasures accordingly. The core essence of a DoS is to affect the availability of instances or objects and eventually render them inaccessible. Thus, for any information system to serve its purpose, it must be available at any time. Hence why every computing system within the interoperability flow must function correctly to achieve that.
• Use Service Mesh- With the increase in the use of microservices, the importance of using a service mesh has increased too. Similar to the API gateways, service mesh uses different layers of control and management while routing requests. It is an ideal way for the service communication layer. In API security, service meshes can be used for automation and providing security for larger projects that require deploying multiple APIs.

Test Your API Security

It is suggested to adopt a DevSecOps approach to test web applications, with a critical focus on testing API security. With a range of API architectures, you should test your legacy or contemporary applications including REST API, GraphQL, and SOAP.

Leveraging various discovery mechanisms and tools to ensure dynamic API security, Valuebound has helped multiple fintech clients in deploying secure apps.

If you need to discuss API security with us, drop us a hello and let us wrap our head around your query to develop a feasible solution.

Over the last 5 years, there has been a substantial increase in the digitalization of the world economy and Fintech APIs (application programming interfaces) have a major contribution to this digital upscaling. Financial services are increasingly adopting the use of APIs, which has resulted in a rapid burst of new super fintech apps, business models, and financial services. APIs in the digital payments landscape have been a driving factor for the fintech industry. 49% of respondents said that more than half of the organization's development effort is spent on APIs in 2021—compared to just over 40% in 2020, says Postman’s 2021 State of the API Report. The same report also underscores that it appears organizations will continue investing in APIs: 94% of respondents stated that investment of time and resources into APIs will increase or stay the same even in 2022.

There has also been a significant rise in the deployment of payment touchpoints driven by the implementation of PIDF. The total number of digital payments has also risen by 216% and 10% in terms of volume and value, respectively for the month of March 2022 when compared to March 2019, says Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

RBI data shows an increase of more than 500% in merchants accepting digital modes of payments during the half-year ended September 2021 as compared to the half-year ended March 2019. Looking at the UPI alone, there is an increase of more than 1200% over the same period.

But what does it mean for fintech companies? Let us first understand what fintech APIs are before diving deeper into the subject.

What are Fintech APIs?

Application programming interface or API is a set of codes and protocols which allow different systems to interact with one another. Fintech API or financial technology API is a technology that allows data access across different parties involved in a financial transaction. These parties could be banks, websites or apps, third-party providers, and consumers or end users.

Moreover, fintech API is at the core of seamless customer experience since it renders a seamless checkout experience while also displaying transaction details across the app and on the bank’s website.

There are three types of APIs:

• Public API- Only used by an organization or internal team (58%)
• Private API- Shared only with integration partner (27%)
• Partner API- Openly available on the web (17%)

API Exposure, Open Banking & Digital Payments

In the wake of new regulations for electronic payment services (PSD2), European and the Asia Pacific nations have put pressing importance on the API-driven collaboration between fintech companies and conventional financial services. These regulations make it mandatory for the banks to create and expose APIs which enable third parties to use customer data with their consent.

Three parties that are inherently reliant on API (Fig. 1), viz. banks which need to be a part of an open banking system, merchants which must let customers have a preferred choice for payments, and consumers, who want to be able to perform transactions by transferring funds through apps, share data amongst one another. Hence, the increasing dominance of Application Programming Interfaces or API in the fintech ecosystem is easy to understand.

 Despite being popular, API security threat is a critical concern among fintech organizations. In this insight, we aim to comprehensively discuss these challenges of API security posture.

API- Most-Frequent Attack Vector

90% of applications will have more surface area for the attack in the form of exposed API rather than the user interface, suggests Gartner. This has become a huge security concern for financial institutions and fintech companies, both of which must maintain competitiveness and customers’ trust to thrive.

Some of the most critical API security risks include insufficient logging and monitoring, broken object level, excessive data exposure, user- and function-level authorization, and security misconfiguration.

Types of Fintech API Security Incidents

• Data Exfiltration- Vulnerable APIs can be exposed to gain access to sensitive data of customer accounts and other PII.
• Account Takeover (ATO)- Attackers can target authenticated APIs to takeover customer accounts. ATOs can appear in the form of brute force attacks and credential stuffing.
• Service Disruption- DDoS attacks on business logic tend to slow down services.

Critical Challenges of Fintech API Security

By 2025, there will be less than 50% of APIs that could be managed since explosive growth in APIs is surpassing the capabilities of API management tools. This increase in the number of API security threats prompted the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) to list the top 10  most serious API security issues, which are discussed below.

1. Broken Object-Level Authorization- APIs can unintentionally expose endpoints that are delegated to handle object identifiers. This can create an issue of wide attack surface Level Access Control.
2. Broken User Authentication- Incorrect implementation of authentication mechanism tens to allow authentication token compromise or exploiting implementation flaws. In such scenarios, attackers can steal others’ identities either permanently, or temporarily. API security is hence compromised when a system cannot identify a client or user due to identity theft.
3. Excessive Data Exposure- When developers expose all object properties during generic implementations without paying attention to individual sensitivity, it can lead to a major API security breach. Clients shouldn’t be left to perform data filtering before it is available to a user.
4. Lack of Resources & Rate Limiting- A client or user may request certain numbers or sizes of resources. But, APIs do not restrict this number or size. This can in turn impact the performance of the API server, while also causing Denial of Service (DoS); hence leaving an open invitation to authentical flaws like brute force.
5. Broken Function Level Authorization- Authorization flaws can occur due to complexity in access control policies within an organization. Attackers tend to exploit these issues to gain access to administrative functions or users’ resources.
6. Mass Assignment- When a client’s data (eg. JSON) is bound to data models without considering proper properties filtering on the basis of allow-list, it can lead to mass assignment. This allows attackers to make amendments in object properties because it opens various vulnerable points like exploring other API endpoints, guessing object properties, providing additional object properties, or reading the documentation.
7. Security Misconfiguration- This could be a result of ad-hoc configurations, insecure or incomplete default configurations, unnecessary HTTP methods, misconfigured HTTP headers, CORS, or Cross-Origin resource sharing, and verbose error messages that contain sensitive information.
8. Injection- Some instances of injection flaws include Command Injection, NoSQL, and SQL. These incidents are a result of sending untrusted data to an interpreter in response to a query or command. Malicious data of attackers can con interpreters in executing uncalled-for commands or accessing data without authorization.
9. Improper Assets Management- APIs can expose several endpoints to attackers more than conventional web applications. There could also be issues like exposed debug endpoints and deprecated API versions. This lays high value on updated documentation and deploying API version inventory.
10. Insufficient Logging & Monitoring- When this issue is accompanied by ineffective or missing integration alongside incident response, it leaves a door open for attackers to pivot more systems. It allows attackers to tamper with data, which can either be extracted or destroyed- both of which can further attack the system. It could take well over 200 days to detect an API security breach of this kind.

API Security Attacks can be Ruthless and Relentless

Increase in the usage and traffic of APIs has led to more attacks, which leave Fintech companies vulnerable. 34% of the SALT (leading security research firm that identifies API security vulnerabilities) customer accounts have experienced over 100 attacks per month in July 2022, reveals data. And another 15% have experienced 500 or more attempted attacks per month, up from 11% a year ago.

Nearly half (47%) of the respondents indicate that they have identified vulnerabilities in production APIs, 38% have experienced authentication problems, and 31% have seen sensitive data exposure and privacy incidents.

These numbers call for an urgent and immediate need to mitigate API security challenges and risks mentioned above. In the following insight, we are suggesting a technology roadmap for a winning fintech API security platform.

If you need to discuss API security with us, drop us a hello and let us wrap our head around your query to develop a feasible solution.
 

990 million compromised and exposed data records over a period of one year across the globe sound alarming, doesn’t it? That’s the number that IBM X-Force research gives us when it examines security breaches in the firms, and finds misconfigured cloud workloads as the primary reason for cybersecurity threats. Additionally, there is a 20% year-over-year increase in the number of publicly disclosed incidents attributed to cloud misconfiguration. This blog aims at helping Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) of the fintech companies in solving a critical challenge of such misconfigurations and how they can protect their infrastructures. We also discuss how fintech companies like Cred solved the challenge of cloud misconfiguration.

What is Cloud Misconfiguration?

Cloud misconfiguration is a major compliance risk that can unknowingly expose a company’s unencrypted data to the public without authentication set up. When a company doesn’t configure the cloud-based platform or system in a correct way and leads the door open to attackers and hackers, it is called cloud misconfiguration. It can take many forms, such as-

• Improper network functionality
• Storing encryption keys and passwords in open repositories
• Creating public accessibility to storage buckets
• Unrestricted access to exposed data stored on the cloud

Examples of data and security breaches are countless, but one that’s worth taking notice of is the FedEx security breach in 2018. The company unknowingly exposed thousands of scanned documents including drivers’ licenses, passports, and delivery mail forms due to the company’s inability to secure its AWS cloud storage server.

Cloud Misconfiguration: A Critical Security Threat for FinTech

Cloud-native platforms have become bait for fintech companies to build resilient and agile application architectures, but the truth is that compromised cloud security is the biggest threat that would stop established players in financial services and fintech companies from using cloud capabilities to their full potential. And, 62% of the IT and cybersecurity professionals surveyed by Crowd Research Partners identified cloud misconfiguration as the most critical threat to data and security.

Classic cloud misconfiguration reasons include-

• Unrestricted Outbound Access
• Unrestricted Access To Non-HTTP/HTTPS Ports
• Unrestricted Inbound Access On Uncommon Ports
• Unrestricted ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) Access

While the cloud assets are on a rise, the attackers are increasingly using cloud-based messaging and storage services to blend into legitimate traffic. And some groups are experimenting with new techniques in encryption and code obfuscation to go unnoticed. The more time attackers have inside the compromised security environment of an organization, the higher the cost of a breach- $5 trillion to be precise, industry research says, and a vast majority of these breaches are a result of cloud misconfiguration. Also, longer periods of undetected attacks give hackers access to more accounts, devices, and data pieces.

This has raised many alarms across Information Security teams of the fintech companies, while also posing some serious questions- how effectively are they protecting their customers’ data and securing their own digital assets? What are they doing to overcome this challenge? One of the critical questions is also about the Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) for such attacks.

How to Eliminate Cloud Misconfiguration Challenge?

When it comes to protecting digital identities, and securing valuable data some steps can help businesses in avoiding data breaches. Valuebound suggests the following methods on how FinTech companies can eliminate cloud misconfiguration challenges (Fig. 1)

Adopt Cloud Security Posture Assurance Software

Cloud helps with standardization and automation. Hence, the conventional security assessment methods with required manual auditing can be done away with. Cloud security posture assurance software is the answer because by calling cloud platform APIs, it retrieves real-time and actual configurations of cloud resources that have been consumed. Thereafter, the software compares it with the set standard, which allows organizations to understand baseline deviations through reports and dashboards. Such software and products can typically facilitate compliance reporting for various regulations, laws, and frameworks including PCI, HIPAA, CIS, and NIST.

Adopt DevSecOps Operating Model

Many fintech executives are already recognizing a trending security shift towards DevSecOps operating model. If your organization is adopting security assessment methods, it is also essential to understand that integration of security in the process of continuous governance is a must. At the focal point of the DevSecOps operating model is setting up a security baseline which acts as a yardstick for monitoring and tracking actual status or issues through resolution. DevSecOps also implement continuous compliance assurance to check risk exposure and actual status of compliance.

Adopt Minimalist Authority Principle

Outbound traffic must use the minimalist authority principle to combat the challenge of unrestricted outbound access. A common practice among the majority of AWS users is to configure inbound ports in the security groups while forgoing outbound ports. Imposing limitations on outbound traffic can direct traffic only to servers and applications which need to communicate. This helps in bringing down the risk of data exfiltration, internal network scans, and lateral movement. The servers may also require RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) or SSH (Secure Socket Shell) inbound ports in managing them.

Restrict High-Level Ports to Necessary Systems Only

Many services use TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and UDP (User Datagram Protocol) internet protocol suites and ports to obfuscate what’s running in their cloud environment, but this is not enough. It will not protect your organization from random internet scans or a smart hacker. Some of the services can open uncommon ports too, which often go off the radar. In such a case, you must ask if your web server has a statistics page or PHPMyAdmin functioning on port 8443, or Apache Tomcat services leak on port 8080. High-level ports are ideal to be restricted only to necessary systems.

Block ICMP

ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) is among the most important protocol, and leaving it unattended on the internet can expose your fintech company to vulnerable attacks. ICMP’s most common practice is using ICMP Echo for verifying is the servers are responsive and online. ICMP Echo, therefore, acts as a top-notch diagnostic tool for security professionals. But here’s a catch. It is also an excellent tool for hackers who can use Nmap or Fping to ensure that your server is indeed online. So what’s your best bet? Block ICMP!

Setup Robust Network Detection And Response (NDR) Mechanism

Until the most recent times, it was very difficult to parse and capture network traffic in the cloud, which was one of the critical reasons why cloud security lagged behind conventional security. But with the network detection and response (NDR) mechanism monitoring network communication in real-time became possible. It is hence seen as the easiest and quickest way to stay ahead of hackers in a dynamic and complex ecosystem. NDR enables rapid threat detection and deep visibility on-premises, in real-time. The gap is also closing in with the advent of Azure and AWS traffic mirroring solutions.

How Fintech Firms Solve Cloud Misconfiguration Challenge?

“One of the crucial Key Performance Questions (KPQ) for any incident response process is to continuously improve and reduce Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) from days to seconds,” says CRED. To solve the critical challenge of cloud misconfiguration, CRED uses the tool DIAL (Did I Alert a Lambda?).
DIAL is an automated tool that monitors, detects, and alerts cloud misconfigurations across all its AWS accounts. DIAL overview (Fig. 2) shows how its inbuilt detection mechanism works to prevent common misconfiguration mistakes that can jeopardize AWS infrastructure.

Composed of a bundle of AWS services like EventBridge, API Gateway, and LAMBDA, DIAL is deployed in  Master-Worker architecture and is ideal for use in AWS organization. With DIAL’s deployment, CRED’s MTTD is anywhere between 4 seconds to 10 seconds only. That is how CRED uses DIAL’s capabilities to reduce average detection time, and scale at large.

Select a vendor with proven product capabilities

Bringing managers at infrastructure management, security operations centers, information security, and DevOps to have a common understanding of cloud misconfiguration can help an organization implement best practices for cybersecurity for the cloud.

A vendor with proven product capabilities and best practices in implementing such cloud security assurance processes, along with introducing newer opportunities can transform your product into an integrated digital asset with high-level, unbreachable security. If you are looking to partner with one such vendor, drop us a hello and we would be happy to engineer solutions for your challenges.
 

Between 2019 and 2020, reportage of Phishing and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) grew by 40%, while identity theft, merchant fraud, malware, and cyber espionage grew by 20%, as per CERT-In study. With such increasing trends, Cybersecurity in fintech has become one of the most critical pain points of the industry, especially in a growing economy like India which is at the cusp of digitalization. With an increasing number of financial services hopping on to the technology bandwagon and more patrons choosing digital modes of payments, the risks of online fraud, information theft, virus attacks, and identity cloning are only going to further increase in the coming days.

Attackers’ playbook includes applications and web portals with compromised cybersecurity; and cyberattacks appear in the form of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), ransomware, application vulnerability exploits, merchant frauds, spam, and reconnaissance attacks. Other examples of cybersecurity threats include software supply chain attacks and account takeovers (Fig. 1)

Not only can such attacks cause serious financial loss, but also lead to a dent in the brand’s value apart from paralyzing infrastructure and critical customer-oriented services. Therefore, along with the diverse and deep digital experience, there is also a critical need to secure a business and its customers from damaging, costly, and frequent cybersecurity incidents. Software Supply Chain Security (SSCS) or third-party security risk management is at the core of every fintech’s agenda. Cybersecurity is now given high priority status at product design and decision-making levels across Information Security Professionals and fintech companies’ leadership teams. But what are the fintech security challenges that companies face?

Some of the current fintech risks and challenges concerning cybersecurity

• Identity Management- When a user subscribes or registers to an app, a fintech company gathers data, which creates digital identity management and data ownership concerns. But what happens to a customer’s data after they’ve canceled a subscription? Data deletion mechanisms, therefore, need to be in place, the absence of which can cause compliance issues and data stealing by attackers. This takes us to the next pain point of cybersecurity, i.e., data security.
• Data Security- $18.5 million approximately! That is the annual cost spent by capital market firms and banks on combating cybercrimes, underscores the Accenture study. Hackers target system weaknesses to exploit information like financial data, contact, and personally identifiable information. 64% of the fintech companies are aware of such data breaches only until it’s too late.
• Regional Security Requirements- Fintech companies must follow regulations concerning regional data protection and KYC (Know Your Customer) practices. Privacy legislation at a regional level limits FinTech software on the data that it can collect and process. Fintech companies also need to make an understanding of how different countries can interpret the same legislative concepts. FinTech apps therefore must be built with practical tools and an understanding of the local regulations. In the absence of this, a FinTech company may isolate itself from certain markets.

Apart from the aforementioned challenges, Deloitte mentions the following challenges in managing cybersecurity as well (Fig. 2).

But, what are the factors or underlying reasons that can cause such security threats as far as cybersecurity and data protection are concerned?

Factors attributing to cybersecurity threats

A lot of attacks mentioned above are caused due to factors like:

• Inadequate security on devices of end-users
• Unpatched and vulnerable operating systems
• Installing cracked applications on devices
• Incomprehensive designing of security controls for products that digital payment products
• API exposure to untrusted and untested interfaces due to multiple data interface across product

All the aforementioned challenges can be tackled with the software development vendor and engineering partner who understands these concerns in and out. Valuebound has helped FinTech companies worldwide in building secure products with careful methodologies and frameworks. We suggest following FinTech cybersecurity solutions to make your platform safer and secure.

Cybersecurity Solutions for FinTech Companies

Companies that give due importance to financial well-being and brand value must also leverage the latest data security techniques and methodologies. What can a FinTech company do for data protection and cybersecurity?

Let’s consider some of the industry best practices for building FinTech products with robust security.

Data Encryption

Encryption is a process of encoding critical information into codes that need special keys for deciphering it in an understandable and readable format. FinTech companies can secure data with complex technologies and encryption algorithms like RSA (highly secure algorithm with private and public encryption keys), Twofish (freeware algorithm encrypting data into 128-bit blocks), 3DES (encryption method preferred for credit card PINs encryption), P2PE and EMV.

“Technologies that devalue data such as– Tokenization, P2PE, EMV & 3DS can play a critical role in helping prevent theft incidents from becoming breaches,” says Nitin Bhatnagar, Associate Director, India, PCI SSC. The goal behind data encryption is the elimination of persistent value in data that is used to perform a transaction. Hence, if an attacker tries to steal information or data, the merchant, consumer, and system still remain secure.

Tokenization

The process of replacing sensitive information with a generated number or token is called tokenization. Unique databases or token vaults may be used to decrypt original data into readable formats. To make a FinTech app even more secure, companies can also encrypt a token vault.

Today, tokenization has emerged as a real game changer, especially in the payments ecosystem. It must be adopted to ensure payment security, improve payment data security, and also address consumer privacy concerns.

Role-Based Access Control

A FinTech app typically can include the roles of an IT Specialist, admin, manager, support staff and the customer. Role based access control (RBAC) can then be used to restrict access to a network depending upon the user’s association with the FinTech company. This ensures restricted or varying access or regular employees and end-users who then cannot use corporate information. Conclusively, it reduces security threats, both internally as well as externally. RBAC-enabled product development requires solid engineering capabilities and robust technical expertise.

Implementing Authentication Technologies

One-Time Passwords (OTPs), mandatory change of passwords, monitoring suspicious activities like failed logins, short log-in sessions, and multi-factor authentication are some of the authentication methodologies that help in securing data by understanding and analyzing user behavior. Dynamix extra layers of protection can help users in completing their transactions safely and securely.

DevSecOps

DevOps is the common practice among most software development companies, but now with cybersecurity being at the core of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), DevSecOps has become the new vogue. What’s the difference? DevSecOps means the prioritization of developing a secure codebase with the same DevOps principles, i.e., CI/CD (Continuous Integration/ Continuous Development), collaboration, automation, and communication. DevSecOps only shifts its focus on embedding security at the early stages of SDLC. DevSecOps methodology uses cybersecurity at the central part of the production pipeline with other phases like architectural designing, coding, and testing.

Building secure FinTech products and solutions

The average data breach costs in 2021 is $4.24 million, a 10% rise from 2020 findings, according to IBM and Ponemon Institute report, and the most common initial attack vector is compromised credentials. This speaks volumes about the concerns of FinTech companies in developing a secure FinTech solution. So how do you plan to build a secure app with limited resources? Valuebound’s product engineering team builds a secure platform and high-grade product with all regulations and security concerns under consideration.

Our team sprints with clients to create a validated hypothesis with a security roadmap, analysis and risk log, cloud assessment, AWS Security Maturity document, and budget. If you wish to develop a secure FinTech solution or have a compliant concern, speak to us to learn more about our software development and product engineering services for FinTech cybersecurity.

Fintech market in India, valued at INR 2.30 Trillion in 2020 and expected to reach around INR 8.35 trillion by 2026 at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of ~25%, has been one of the highest-growing technology segments globally. Among the most significant innovations in financial services that emerged is - lending and payments. While conventionally these two areas were only dominated by established players, they are now the battleground of over 2/3rd of the world’s fintech companies which are valued at over $1 billion, also called ‘unicorns’.

Speaking specifically about India, the country is now among the biggest markets where structural enablers to set up and incubate fintech have joined hands strongly and at the right time. India has the highest FinTech adoption rate globally of 87% which is significantly higher than the global average rate of 64%. So what has driven the digital engine for the financial sector of the country? Deloitte’s report says, ‘Internet data access, smartphones along with utility infrastructure including Aadhaar based authentication and India fintech stack capabilities are likely to provide the impetus to India’s FinTech sector.’

To improve operational effectiveness and better customer reach, the Indian financial service industry and fintech companies have adopted cutting-edge technology, but the pace of technology adoption has not been proportionate to its potential, which has led to gaps in the penetration of financial services. Some of the key challenges that the FinTech industry faces today include data and payment security, compliance, lack of awareness of end-users, working alongside legacy systems like banks, and ensuring user retention and user experience.

In this insight, we talk about the challenges of the two top FinTech companies- CRED and RazorPay and tech and business solutions to these challenges.

Before we survey these companies, we must understand what is a fintech?

Fintech companies are the ones that offer applications of technology to financial services or products in a way that is economically viable. India’s fintech companies can be categorized across six segments- Payments, Credit, Investment Management, Personal Finance Management, BankTech and InsurTech.

The opportunities for fintech companies in an expanding market like India lies in shaping their customer behavior and addressing challenges in the financial industry with the right technology solutions. There’s a threefold opportunity for a fintech company in India which are-

1. Fintech startup can reduce costs and improve financial services quality because it is not burdened by IT systems, legacy operations, and physical networks. Therefore the advantages of sleek operating models can be passed on to the customers.
2. Fintech industry can develop innovative models for risk assessment by leveraging unique fintech technology like AI/ML, big data, and alternative data for underwriting credit or developing credit scores for customers with poor credit history. This will improve financial inclusion in India.
3. FinTech can create a stable, secure, and diverse financial service landscape since fintech companies are not so homogenous as compared with the incumbent banking system. These companies offer to learn templates for improving culture and capabilities.

By learning to adopt best practices, a FinTech startup can stand the test of time. But what defines best practices? In an interview with PCI Security Standards Council, Adelia Castelino, Co-founder Managing Director, In Solution Global Pvt Ltd. says, “The four main areas of innovation that are responsible for this growth are: Hyper-personalized customer service, tokenization, cloud-native payment platforms, and e-converse through e-commerce. The common theme among these innovation drivers is the security of data and convenience for the consumer.”

Top FinTech companies in India, CRED, and Razorpay work proactively to provide a secure ecosystem to customers, thus becoming popular unicorns in lesser time.

What does CRED say about the FinTech ecosystem, challenges & solutions?

CRED was founded in 2018 and is pitched as a reward-based credit card bill payment platform. CRED became a FinTech unicorn in 2021. Himanshu Kumar Das, Head of Security, Risk & Compliance, CRED states, “The recent innovations in Fintech which help ensure safer, securer and lightning-fast transactions with enhanced user experience have completely transformed and modernized banking and financial institutions.”

The challenge: There is more data available in digital format now. Payment providers and financial services face a key challenge of securing customers’ personal information considering their digital footprint and personal data is their identity appendage. For this reason, Software Supply Chain Security (SSCS) has become a strategic focus area for organizations. Critical security challenges in the payment ecosystem include ransomware and account takeover.

A lot of security threats and cyberattacks are attributed to factors like cracked application installation on devices, unpatched operating systems, multiple data interference which causes API exposure to the untrusted interface, and lack of security focus on third-party vendors.

“Building a secure and robust Fintech application or product is an extremely challenging and complicated and moreover a very expensive and time-consuming task,” says Himanshu. So, how does CRED ensure safe and secure transactions for customers?

The solution: As an effective and essential security solution, CRED uses tokenization and encryption in the FinTech space. CRED suggests using complex encryption algorithms such as 3DES or, RSA to protect critical data. Tokenisation has emerged as the latest trend for implementing security solutions associated with credit card numbers and payment data. The technology uses a generated number called ‘token’ which replaces credit card numbers, so as to protect sensitive customer data.

CRED also suggests designing and implementing robust frameworks for cybersecurity. Identification of ‘crown jewels’ and protecting them from Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS), Phishing, Malware exploits, Social Engineering Methods, Application vulnerability exploits, Identity Thefts, Spam, and Merchant Frauds.

Rapid innovation in technology has revealed multitudes of new enablers which include API-driven composable micro-services, Cloud Native Architecture, AI-ML powered data analytics, risk and fraud management, and Public-Private sandboxes- all of which enable support innovation, security, and also regulatory reform. Multi-factor authentication using trusted devices, and the use of biometrics for authentication have further enabled FinTech companies to stay a step ahead of criminals.

With the rising number of online transactions, providing a secure payment gateway becomes mandatory to overcome other challenges like user retention and user experience. Razorpay is another exemplary B2B fintech startup that provides APIs for payment gateways.

What does Razorpay say about the FinTech ecosystem, challenges & solutions?

Founded in 2014, Razorpay started off as a payment gateway, but soon entered other spaces like payments, lending, banking, and SME payroll management. It joined the unicorn Fintech club of India in 2020. Razorpay is the converged payment solution that enables merchants to accept, process, and disburse payments with the help of its product suite.

In 2021, the company says that Tier-2 & Tier-3 cities recorded noteworthy growth in volumes of online transactions, 45.56%, and 54.33% respectively. This FinTech company has earned the trust of over 5 million small and large businesses for payments. Razorpay hails as the most valued, privately-held fintech company and has also recorded an impressive 3X rise in its transactional volume, logged at 400% in September 2021.

The challenge: Despite being a success story, Razorpay’s recent cybercrime story speaks volumes about security challenges. According to the PCI Security Standards Council, India ranked very high on the list of countries that are a target for cyber-attacks. A key reason for this is the lack of awareness of end-user devices. “CERT-In publications show that, between 2019 and 2020, reportage of Phishing and DDoS grew by 40%, while identity theft, merchant fraud, malware, and cyber espionage grew by 20%,” says Adelia Castelino.

The second challenge that Razorpay speaks of is collaborating with legacy financial services like banks. “A fintech startup intervening with the banks’ legacy systems can cause the emergence of new, unforeseen risks like strategic risks, compliance risks, operational risks, cyber risks, and more,” says Razorpay.

The third challenge that Razorpay highlights is maintaining customer relationships and retaining customers. “If you want your customer base to stick with your product and keep coming back, you need to make sure you retain your customers for the long run by building long-term customer relationships.”

The solution: Fintech at the early stages of adoption in a disruptive economy must focus on educating people about the concept, says Razorpay. To make the app more secure, solutions like real-time notifications and alerts, data encryption and obfuscation, two-factor authentication, and behavior analysis are suggested.

Speaking of working with legacy systems, the FinTech company suggests that the most innovative solutions will emerge from collaboration. One example of such tech collaboration is the company’s neo-banking platform, RazorpayX. “We started our neo banking journey by creating a whole new platform on which we could build products and integrations. We created an entire API and dashboard payouts platform over a virtual account setup that merchants could use during the early access in 2018,” says Razorpay. It also built RazorpayX with Current Accounts in collaboration with RBL Banks to include standard banking services like accounting statements, debit cards, and cheque book.

As for user retention and user experience, Razorpay explains that the trust component in a building environment like India is still in infancy but the solution lies in not necessarily selling your product, but “making them understand what the innovation is, and how and why it can be beneficial for them to use the services.” Providing quality service, building great customer relationships by tracking customer journeys, and understanding how they interact with your product provides insights into what works and what doesn’t. User retention, thus greatly depends upon customer satisfaction and happiness.

Summing Up

India is amongst the fastest growing Fintech markets in the world and as of 2022, there are 6,636 FinTech startups in India. The future of fintech and industry 4.0 is emerging in the country. A FinTech company can thrive in a disruptive economy by overcoming challenges by partnering with engineering solutions vendors who help create a successful Fintech MVP platform. If you have a project blueprint or need a hand in solving challenges, touch base with us to learn how we’ve helped our FinTech clients overcome critical tech challenges during the lifecycle of their super FinTech App.

Globally, fintech companies raised more than $90 billion in the first three quarters of 2021, almost double the pace in 2020, with 42 new fintech unicorns minted in the third quarter alone, says McKinsey.

Finance as a sector includes financial service companies and fintech companies, and the sector juggernauts towards digital transformation with strategic technological trends. Before we dive into these trends, we must first understand what is fintech? Financial Technology, also known as FinTech, is described as the new technology which automates or improves the functioning of financial services. FinTech companies help the finance sector with better efficiency and delivery through algorithms, software, computers, and smartphones.

In our blog series on FinTech insights, we are going to discuss extensively about the FinTech trends shaping the industry. In this blog, we are going to discuss the challenges of the fintech industry in India and the technologies used to solve those challenges.

What challenged the status quo for FinTech Companies in India?

“Increased demand for inclusive financial services, customer expectations, and the business need to reduce costs while providing faster, safer, and more reliable services underpin the rise and growth of FinTech companies,” explains EY. So what challenges the status quo in the financial services sector?

1. Firstly, more fintech companies want to be branded as digital-native in the FinTech landscape. This means that several services which traditionally were dependent upon human capital for loan disbursal, real-time payments, investment advisory, peer-to-peer lending, and other financial services, are automating tasks through one ‘Super App’.
2. Secondly, there are now efficient and sleek offerings from FinTech companies, which help businesses in reducing costs and providing more customer-driven services.
3. And thirdly, rising advancements in technologies like data science, automation, and AI/ML push traditional financial services companies towards a digital environment.

Current status of FinTech in Asia

“People skipped the cards stage altogether in the Asia-Pacific market. Then newer technologies came in, mostly mobile-payment-based, a lot of wallet platforms. Basically, every single company that has a substantial number of consumers decided to start monetizing these consumers by providing payment applications that replace the need to use debit or credit cards,” says Arik Shtilman, CEO of FinTech platform provider, Rapyd (U.S.). This explains one of the most significant trends, i.e., payments accounting for almost half of India’s FinTech unicorns (42.9%).

Zeroing in at a granular level in Asia, if we speak specifically about India we see that country’s total fintech opportunity is set to rise to $1.3 Tn by 2025, according to Inc42’s State Of Indian Fintech Report, Q2 2022. There are 102 unicorns in India, and the latest entrant to the list is neo-banking FinTech start-up, Open. The total number of FinTech companies in India is 21. So what shifts are paving way for technology trends in the FinTech industry?

Large Shifts for FinTech Companies

Three shifts that are playing out across Asia, according to McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) research are:

• More consumers reaching the highest tiers of the income pyramid, and movement within the consuming class is likely to be a larger driver of consumption growth than movement into it,
• Cities driving consumption growth, but increasingly diverse cohorts within cities account for promising growth sources, and
• Relationship between income and consumption breaks down in some instances, new consumption curves are emerging in specific categories.

Sitting upon these shifts, there are 10 critical technology trends playing across the FinTech industry in India.

10 Technology Trends Driving FinTech Industry in India

1. The Rise of SuperApp: FinTech, corporate giants, and BigTech are racing toward creating a one-stop shop for offering a comprehensive financial service platform.
2. BNPL rewriting credit: Buy Now Pay Later has become a new buzz-phrase in the FinTech industry in India. It allows consumers to leapfrog credit cards, and directly get instant digital credit during purchase.
3. InsurTech, a rising example of product innovation: Its digital distribution is making penetration of insurance products easier and accessible for consumers.
4. Neobanks serving underserved or unserved customer segments: There is an increase in hyper-personalized banking services.
5. WealthTech rise during COVID: This trend has transformed the investment environment of the country, and serves as a critical vertical in scaling-up new equity investors.
6. API banking development: Embedded banking is helping each financial (or non-financial) company in adding FinTech as a strategic feature to enhance customer experience.
7. MSME becomes a battleground for FinTech: Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises have shown massive acceleration towards the digital landscape, thus making it a ripe market for disruption.
8. Digital Lending attracts most investors: This is the most-funded FinTech business model and is maturing further with an increased focus on collections.
9. Digital Payment account for the biggest sub-sector: This sector continues drawing large funding, and has the most number of firms queuing for IPO. Major unicorns like PhonePe, Paytm, and BharatPe being heavily payment-focused (Fig. 1).
10. Rise of Crypto: Bitcoin, Ethereum, digital tokens like NFTs, and digital cash rely heavily on blockchain technology. Despite becoming popular, the major hiccup in this sub-sector is regulation and compliance.

Road Ahead for FinTech in India

India’s FinTech journey is unique because governments, regulators, financial institutions, and FinTechs contribute collectively towards making the finance sector digital-native. Yet, the technological challenges and policy rails need to achieve and sustain higher growth for successful collaborations.

Strategic adoption of technology trends can lead to transformational evolution in the way financial services or products are delivered to end-users and helps in creating exceptional value for customers.

If you are facing a tech challenge in deploying a project or need a hand in starting a project, reach out to us to learn how Valuebound has successfully converted ideas into unique digital solutions through a team of creative product engineers and developers.

By rethinking their business models and embracing the innovative strategies of digital-only banking, traditional banks could boost revenues by nearly 4% annually, resulting in more than half a trillion dollars in additional revenues by 2025, according to Accenture. And as per the 2022 Digital transformation and Next-gen technology survey by Broadridge, about three-quarters of C-suite executives across top financial firms have successfully transitioned from paper to completely digital communications.

Cloud migration seems to be an easier road for financial services companies if they set the goal of digitizing and modernizing their everyday business functions. But, what constitutes a successful formula for driving digital transformation in finance using the cloud? “If there is one thing separating these digital transformation leaders from the rest of the pack, it is their capacity to fully embrace the cloud,” says Mark Schlesinger, former CIO of Broadridge Financial Solutions. Such an embrace needs advanced stages of digital transformation.

Only 28% of the digital transformation business leaders have been able to achieve the advanced stages of transformation across the company, suggests Forbes. And only 14% of the companies sustain digital transformation and see improved results. Challenges in achieving advanced levels of cloud transformation in financial companies can be listed as-

• Creating centralized data platforms
• Technological execution capabilities not scaling up their tasks
• Rise in expenses due to staled technological environment
• Inability to align digital capabilities and changing demands of the market
• Complex infrastructures choke data requirements needed for sophisticated analytics

Such advanced cloud technology implementation has been an enabler of success, and companies that have deployed such digital efforts derive multiple benefits. The firms that are struggling with that cloud transformation must develop a long-term plan based upon the exact business outcomes desired from cloud deployment.

Top 5 strategic recommendations (Fig.1) to help you understand your enterprise’s full cloud potential are:

• Considering PaaS (platform as a service)
• Reimagining existing operations
• Migrating current applications from physical-security perimeter to cloud
• Planning cloud transformation with DevOps through containerization
• Reviewing people strategy to ensure successful model enhancement

Consider PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service)

Focusing your business investments in domains where the cloud helps in increasing revenues and margins is one area where financial companies can enable business-technology transformation. Data and Digital Platforms or DDP are among the crucial elements of driving cloud transformation for finance. DDP makes use of components like microservices, APIs, and a data lake, which allows companies to build applications in scalable and modular ways and gives them real-time data accessibility. Tech vendors can enable the processing and governance of DDPs through PaaS.

Cloud-native financial companies push code releases into production at a faster speed with the help of end-to-end automation. Automated cloud platforms help companies to release codes 100-1000X in a day, which helps them in meeting demands sooner, and get feedback faster. McKinsey suggests that the companies which adopt cloud platforms have 20-40% faster time-to-market for newer capabilities.

Reimagine existing operations

Businesses can reimage operations by adapting AI and natural language processing (NLP) which support digital customer service. Financial companies can also adopt optical character recognition (OCR) and robotic process automation (RPA) which streamline everyday processes like credit card processing, account closure, accounts payable, and report automation.

Cloud-first technologies can help employees in setting up operational metrics or KPIs, which offer higher transparency to the organization. Major cloud-service providers offer various native services which also provide access to the 3rd-party ecosystems. Such services have also evolved to move beyond the basic infrastructure, and include advanced functionality, such as data aggregation, facial recognition, and quantum computing.

Citing a real-world example, Rob Cameron, CEO of Barclays Payments says, “It’s about looking at how we can use technology to change processes to the benefit of the customer.” The company, for example, recently transformed its onboarding process. Rob Cameron says, “Our digital POD worked to build a better journey while also attacking the underlying questions set. Their work reduced the questions by 75% for new bank customers and by nearly 95% for existing bank customers.”

Barclays Payments now uses technology to inherit the remaining data across. The company had launched this digital initiative at the beginning of 2020, and to date, has seen call time reduction by 2/3rd, which indicates that agents are spending time on finding solutions for customers.

Migrate current applications to the cloud

Moving legacy systems to the cloud offers several benefits like improved performance, full compliance, and reduced license fees. Roughly 1/5th of the companies spend enough time and resources on building zero-trust applications which require no network perimeter. Many CIOs and CFOs opt for this model because this acts as a great combination of security, protection, and cost.

At the top level, companies can focus remediation on fixing compliances and security and later optimize the systems. Either this or they can also optimize all apps on the go. The kind of migrating path a financial company takes depends on the kind of risk they’re willing to underwrite. Migrating first, and optimizing later can help in breaking through the gridlock that several companies experience in cloud transformation. However, this approach needs company leadership to accept that some of the applications would cost more in the immediate run.

Top Leadership must define a clear strategy for replacing their legacy systems and leveraging the cloud for supporting existing business priorities. With clarity, you can also set a business case for those apps or workloads which will benefit the organization most with early migration.

A company requires the highest investment in rewriting the existing application into cloud-native platforms. This yields the most improvement in terms of agility and cost of ownership.

Rewriting an app for cloud-native requires the proprietary services of tech vendors. Some of the apps which were designed natively for cloud architecture can easily be configured to the present systems. However, such sophisticated plans require application developers and engineering skills, which financial companies struggle to have in-house. Having a mature full-stack DevOps tech vendor can build the cloud into your present legacy network design.

Plan cloud transformation with DevOps through containerization

“Containers are a way of packaging an application so that it’s easy to get the application and run it in any kind of environment. So, a lot of the complexity of installing and configuring an application is taken away. Containers let a developer abstract all of that and make a very simple package that’s easy to consume,” Tim Hynes from Rubrik, a cloud data management company defined containerization.

Through containerization, developers put together the tools, libraries, settings, code, and runtime engine in one package, and make it portable. This makes the software easy to be deployed in a cloud environment and needs fewer resources to function. Refactoring applications or software in containerization offers greater flexibility, sustainability, higher productivity, agility, and scalability. The payback period of most companies with this effort is no longer than 18 months, explains McKinsey.

Docker containers are aptly fit for DevOps because it allows the teams to break huge applications into microservices, which can then be rapidly updated or deployed. This provides quicker development velocity.

Planning cloud transformation with DevOps across apps and software with the use of containerization can also offer cost-efficiency. Designing and running containerization with pre-defined standards facilitates a predictable pathway that can also provide the repatriation of software or apps from one cloud to another during migration.

Review people's strategy

Successful cloud transformation in financial companies draws a parallel with other factors like people’s strategy. How will the organization change after digital transformation? What would be the new business model enhancements? What changes will be there in the organization’s structure? Business leaders would have to revisit business and IT amalgamation to support such a transformational shift. Since cloud innovation and transformation will bring in a natural change in the organizational chart, it would also be a good time to rethink and review how to adopt a culture with continuous learning or experimentation.

Key Takeaways

Cloud transformation in finance can scale up through vendor support so that various teams can unify on the recommended strategy suggested above. Automating infrastructure provisioning and application delivery with calculated risk assessment is possible through the continuous integration/ continuous delivery (CI/CD) approach, while also keeping security governance using DevOps in mind.

If you have an application migration or cloud deployment project that needs a hand, drop a hello to us to know how we have successfully converted codified blueprints to modern architectures with our unique product engineering capabilities.
 

Opigno LMS is a Drupal-based open source Learning Management System, for any organization, educational institutions, non-profit organizations, and any other enterprises. Organizations like SPIE, World Anti Doping Agency, CaterTrax, Maastricht University etc. adopted Opigno LMS today due to easy accessibility, flexibility, scalability, extensibility, and user-friendly features. Opigno pitches itself as an ideal choice for mid-sized companies to handle training and monitor progress. Since the system is developed around being a learning management solution the adoption can range between schools, colleges, universities and companies which handle training programs for new recruits.

What makes Opigno enterprise-ready?

Opigno LMS offers a customizable e-learning platform with innovative and collaborative features with business as well as a human-centric approach. Continuous support from its consultants and experts makes it a no-cost, no-maintenance solution.

Some of the key features of Opigno include:

• Freedom to create engaging training
• Customizable and engaging content, thanks to the great authoring tools
• Mobile learning & Multilingual management
• Fine-grained content management within the training, courses, modules, and activities
• Guided training creation wizard
• Graphical learning path manager
• Reusable content at all levels (activities, modules, courses)
• Reporting & analytics capabilities such as global user dashboards, and skill management tools

Opigno LMS features makes it an interesting and popular choice among various enterprises. But how do you get started with this? In this blog, we aim to provide a stepwise tutorial on how to install Opigno LMS. For installing the Opigno LMS in your localhost follow the steps given below.

Step 1: Setting up Installation Commands

Installing Opigno LMS on Ubuntu -

If you are using Ubuntu, follow the following points:

• Open /var/www/html folder in the terminal
• Create one folder in html 
• Execute this command to install opigno-composer in the newly created folder

composer create-project opigno/opigno-composer:^3.0

Installing Opigno LMS on Windows -

If you are using windows, the following steps will help you install Opigno LMS:

• Visit /xampp/htdocs
• Create one folder
• Execute this command to install opigno-composer in that newly created folder

composer create-project opigno/opigno-composer:^3.0

This will install the latest version of Opigno-composer in your system.

Step 2: Installing Opigno LMS on your OS

Once the commands shown in step 1 are successfully executed, we now install Opigno-LMS. To install Opigno-LMS, follow the following steps:

• From the terminal, visit the folder opigno-composer, which is freshly installed.
• In this folder execute the below command:

composer require opigno/opigno_lms:^3.0 dompdf/dompdf:0.8.5 --with-all-dependencies

This will install Opigno-LMS with all dependencies.

Step 3: Making Basic Changes in Opigno LMS

Now that the Opigno LMS is installed, some basic changes are needed within the settings. You must follow the following points step by step:

• Visit the websites/default folder, and create the settings.php file from the default.settings.php file, which would already be there.

• Give write access to the settings.php file, so that it will be able to mention the database and the connection associated with it at the time of installation. For giving write access you can execute the command:

  sudo chmod 777 -R settings.php

• Create a directory named “files” inside the default folder where you just created the settings.php file.

• Give write access to the files directory also. For giving write access you can execute the command:

  sudo chmod 777 -R files

Step 4: Installing your site

After executing all the aforementioned steps, you are now ready to install the site. For installing the site visit path:

localhost\<your_folder_name>\opigno-composer\web

At this stage, the drupal installation will be visible to you. Fill in all required details like database name, username, and password, and continue the installation.

Step 5: Site Configuration

After installation, you will be prompted to configure the site. Configure it by providing the site name, site email address, and other details.

This completes your site configuration.

Step 6: Completing Opigno LMS Installation

Now the system will try to redirect you to \user path. If that is not accessible to you, it shall say No requested URL found.

To fix this issue, create a virtual host for the site and provide the path up to the web folder. Once the virtual host is created, try to access the site with the virtual host. It will send you to a login page, as shown in Fig. 1 below.

               

Fill in the credentials you entered at the time of site configuration (refer to Step 5) and follow Fig. 2 below.

               
After verifying the credentials you will be logged in and the dashboard will be visible to you, as shown in Fig. 3 below.

          

Opigno LMS installation is now complete. The above steps should have helped you complete the installation process locally. 

Conclusion

Opigno LMS allows you to derive multiple benefits like flexibility, scalability, interoperability, excellent customer experience, and a unified platform that can control, analyze, and track the movement of your content.

We look forward to your queries and suggestions. Drop us an email or write to us in the comments section below. Also, let us know what other tutorials might interest you!