We are hiring!
PUTTING YOU CLEARLY AHEAD
The technology underpinning Australian financial institutions is typically a mix of legacy systems, newer technology, and pieces provided by various external vendors. While this is adequate, it’s not ideal.
FinClear uses the same kind of technology ‘stack’ – that is, the combination of technologies that come together to deliver our products and services, just as companies like Google, Facebook and Netflix do. These companies build and own all their technology from the back end – the servers and underlying applications – to the client’s mobile phone interface. This makes them fast, flexible, and able to service billions of customers at once.
FinClear, similarly, has the ability to stream our products and services to an almost infinite number of users with no downtime, no scheduled maintenance, and no reliance on external providers.
MICROSERVICES ARCHITECTURE
Most financial services companies run on ‘monolithic’ systems. That means, when something needs to be changed, the whole system is affected. This is why retail online banking, for example, regularly goes down for scheduled maintenance.
Companies like FinClear run on microservices architecture. Within this environment, each small piece of the overall business is run independently of everything else. A good analogy is an office building – if you want to change a washer in the bathroom, you don’t need to shut down the entire building to do it. Microservices architecture allows changes to be made to the technology very easily, without requiring any downtime.
This technology architecture is also behind the ability of the big tech companies to service billions of people all at once. Because it has no redundancies and is so flexible and reliable, it can be delivered to a global marketplace all at the same time with no problems., FinClear’s technology is built the same way today.
CICD - CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION AND DEPLOYMENT
When you think of a service like G Suite (Google’s business solution), you realise that the look, the feel and services change fairly frequently, but without users needing to be notified of scheduled downtime or required to update their software. This is because the architecture allows for CICD – the continuous development and release of system upgrades and fixes without the user being aware that those processes are taking place.
FinClear’s CICD processes make our business extremely nimble, and also makes us extremely robust, and able to respond to changes, issues and client requests incredibly quickly.
OPEN API
Most of us have heard of open APIs. This architecture means other companies can connect to and use your technology platform to build their own businesses – Google GSuite is a good example. At FinClear, we use the same global standards as the big tech companies. Have you ever been offered the ability to log into a new app using your Google or Facebook credentials? This is THE gold standard open API at work. It’s called Google aRPC, and it means that if we wanted to, we could allow everyone to log into FinClear’s systems using their Facebook account.
We won’t do that of course, but what it does mean is that other fintechs can land lightly on top of our architecture and start using it immediately to build their own, innovative businesses. And because we have no third-party vendors within our technology stack, integration is even easier and costs even less. Incidentally, this is the same API that will be used by ASX in the CHESS replacement.