Fintech software development must occur quickly and efficiently. Implementing DevOps practices is just the start of ensuring that fintech companies continue to scale without sacrificing security and compliance. Your engineering culture is arguably just as important.
It’s essential to understand how to leverage the benefits of DevOps in the fintech industry and transition from basic DevOps to a cohesive engineering culture that fosters innovation and collaboration, encompassing talent acquisition and the strategic use of automation to maintain agility.
Some examples of strategies that real companies have used to ensure agile development and operations include:
- Automated Payment Rollouts
- Code-Driven Infrastructure Scaling
- Policy-as-Code for Regulatory Compliance
- Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
- Real-Time Data Pipelines
- Zero-Disruption App Updates
- Secure API Management
Let’s take a look at how fintech firms are applying these DevOps strategies, so that you can decide what may be possible for your fintech applications and how you can integrate agile development into your financial services.
At Trio, our developers are familiar with how fintech organizations function and have worked with many companies in the field before, contributing to software development and IT operations.
With their specialist experience, they can assist you in your own software releases and internal processes, integrating modern DevOps practices and transforming your products and services.
Understanding DevOps in the Fintech Industry
DevOps is all about speed, automation, and cross-team collaboration to create the most efficient and streamlined software development lifecycle. The goal is not only to get companies’ products out to the market faster to meet demand, but also to improve product quality.
When it comes to fintech, there are some added considerations to take into account.
What Makes Fintech Unique?
If you are in the fintech sector, you need to build quickly, but there is also an incredible amount of pressure to get security and compliance right the first time.
In financial technology, even small mistakes could result in a loss of client trust. Any issues cost an incredible amount.
Security needs to be built into your project from the ground up, and regulatory requirements are easier to meet if you hire developers who are familiar with the industry. Understanding that customers value transparency and reliability is also a critical requirement of fintech development.
While basic DevOps enables speed, focusing on a team culture that takes the unique features of the industry into account is the best way to ensure long-term success.
Best Practices and Limitations of DevOps in Fintech
Domain knowledge often results in developers implementing certain best practices to make sure that everything is in order when it comes to both market demands and regulations.
Companies must implement practices like IaC (Infrastructure as Code) development and automated CI/CD pipelines (continuous integration and continuous development) for compliance at every step, and observability or logging so they can find issues quickly.
Security, a non-negotiable, can be encouraged through practices like policy-as-code and even automated scans at regular intervals.
There are also basic coding best practices to consider for DevOps implementation in fintech, such as the use of version control systems.
It’s important not to cut any corners if you can help it. While it may seem worthwhile in the short term, it often results in issues further down the line, which end up being even more costly to fix.
One of the most detrimental cost cuts people make is hiring developers without the necessary experience. Fintech specialists cost more for a reason.
At Trio, we provide those specialists who have worked on similar fintech projects before and who are familiar with the U.S. regulatory environment. Instead of lowering costs by lowering developer quality, we have a host of developers on hand from LATAM and Africa, where the costs of living are naturally lower.
These developers provide cost-effective services at a fraction of the cost of U.S. developers, while providing outstanding work.
Implementing DevOps in Fintech: 7 Real-World Use Cases That Drive Agility
Now, let’s take a look at some of the ways DevOps can enable fintech companies to accelerate development without sacrificing quality. As a CTO, it is important to examine your own fintech business to figure out what may be realistic for you to integrate into your own processes.
1. Automated Payment Rollouts
DevOps automation of any sort can be incredibly beneficial to your company. If you can build a reliable, adaptable payment system and integrate it with an existing banking system, you can iterate on the user-facing features with ease and make rapid changes in response to regulatory updates.
If you are wise about it, you won’t even need to worry about any downtime, and you could easily make revisions.
To implement these automated payment rollouts, you need a well-architected CI/CD pipeline.
This allows you to roll out changes to features such as payment logic, fraud detection regulations, and further integrations with third-party software easily.
2. Code-Driven Infrastructure Scaling
Your infrastructure needs to scale as you get more users, or you risk losing performance. Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) allows you to automate provisioning, test changes in a staging environment, and then manage massive deployments using things like version-control templates.
By treating your infrastructure as large pieces of code, you can minimize the amount of human error and can grow through repetition that you can ensure is compliant.
3. Policy-as-Code for Regulatory Compliance
Policy-as-Code refers to a system where you would take care of anything regarding regulations, whether it’s security or data handling, at a code level.
This is essential for fintech companies spanning multiple regions, who will have to deal with many different regulations that are constantly changing.
Our developers help fintech companies implement Policy-as-Code in such a way that they can automate compliance checks throughout the development process, without slowing down delivery speed, making it a lot easier to get the necessary certificates or approval to function in the financial services sector.
4. Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
SRE lets you balance speed and stability.
Error budgets, service-level objectives (SLOs), and real-time alerting are all common SRE techniques that help developers make code more resilient without losing flexibility. It’s also great for post-incident learning.
The result is that it not only allows fintech companies to quickly adapt but also continue to improve, allowing developers to take a growth-focused approach to software development, which will only benefit you in the future.
5. Real-Time Data Pipelines
Whether you are creating new features or you are offering services that require risk assessments of some sort, you need data to provide your fintech solutions.
AI and ML can be particularly useful in providing unconventional insights into customer behavior. DevOps promotes the creation and maintenance of real-time data pipelines, helping to enhance resilience through fault tolerance, observability, and security.
You can then use these pipelines for anything you need. Some of the most common examples we have seen include smarter and faster decision-making, and even regulatory reporting.
6. Zero-Disruption App Updates
We have mentioned updating software without downtime a couple of times. Downtime for changes, or related to mistakes, can both ruin a company’s reputation, leading to a loss of user base.
The reality is that users are used to having access to their finances and associated financial services, and they are paying for it all the time. Standards in the fintech landscape continue to rise, so we doubt that this trend will change anytime soon.
Our developers have used DevOps practices such as blue-green deployments, canary releases, and feature flags to help companies release updates incrementally and validate them in production. These strategies have the added benefit of allowing you to revert any changes almost instantly if you realize that there is a potential issue.
7. Secure API Management
Fintech companies operate using extensive API ecosystems. With DevOps practices like automated rate limiting, authentication, and version management, you can make sure that your API gateways stay secure and scalable.
Experienced developers also implement monitoring and logging so that you can make sure both partner and customer APIs are safe, and do not limit you in any way.
Building a Fintech Engineering Culture for Agility (Promoting DevEx)
When you are building a DevOps culture, there are a couple of different approaches that you can encourage in your teams. This includes an emphasis on continuous improvement over one-time wins, a healthy work-life balance with a focus on developer well-being alongside development, cross-functional collaboration, and agile development.
Working in fintech services can put developers under a lot of pressure. While it can be tempting to just push out as much work as possible, the result is a team that doesn’t have time to focus on their continued education and starts to fall behind industry trends and best practices.
Everything should be seen as a learning opportunity for continued growth. Similarly, there is always room for improvement, and your developers should consider how they can continue to adjust their existing work or make things easier to alter in the future.
All of this should also accompany a company culture that encourages engineers to speak up when they think there may be an issue, propose new ideas, or even admit when they don’t know something and need some assistance. An approach like this allows you to encourage developer well-being and even incentivise them to stay with you long-term.
The same is true for cross-functional collaboration, although having a team that can communicate freely has the added benefit of speeding up the development process and preventing any delayed communications.
Working in sprints and testing for compliance, scalability, and anything else you may require may seem like a waste of time, but they allow you to implement all of these strategies at regular intervals. Reviewing your code, learning from it, and fixing any potential issues at regular intervals encourages your developers and ensures a better final product.
For all of these reasons, and many more, our developers at Trio have assisted many companies in implementing these practices that naturally result in fintech DevOps best practices.
From DevOps to DevEx: Tools, Automation, and Developer Empowerment
Once your team has the right mindset, you need to make sure that they have the right tools available for them to implement DevOps in your fintech operation efficiently.
DevEx (Developer Experiences) gives your developers everything they might need to make their work as easy as possible. Some tools may be an investment on your part, but the result is faster deployment cycles, easier environment reproduction, and more developers’ autonomy.
For many fintech companies, this investment pays off very quickly.
In terms of CI/CD, which is where we recommend you start, you can consider automations that reduce manual work, prevent regression, and help us with compliance. IaC can help in this too, by allowing developers to create consistent environments quickly and minimize errors.
Implementing developer portals and self-service workflows can also be a relatively cost-effective way to encourage DevEx. They remove bureaucracy and time wasted sharing tools, allowing developers to focus on their work.
Since our developers have worked on similar projects before, they are able to advise you on where DevEx can be easily improved. Their familiarity with a variety of different teams means you won’t get generic advice, but recommendations that come from a wealth of experience and are tailored to your team.
The Future of DevOps in Financial Services
Automations have made massive leaps since the rise of AI and ML. We don’t expect them to go anywhere anytime soon, especially since they can be used by anyone from startups to large enterprises for high-performing operations throughout the development lifecycle.
DevOps principles have also always prioritized practical thinking in an effort to make it easier for developers to iterate without mistakes. Reusable infrastructure patterns and security that have been built into these platforms will continue to allow engineers to work efficiently.
More than ever, companies need to focus on supporting their developers by providing the right tools and promoting a culture that encourages them to produce their best work, rather than just as much work as possible.
If you’re interested in hiring experienced developers to get started on your team, you are in the right place.
Our staff augmentation and outsourcing hiring models mean that you get all the benefits of a Fintech DevOps specialist, without the commitment of a long-term hire. You can also rest assured that you are going to get someone who fits into your team culture very well.
For more information or to get started, reach out to schedule a free consultation.
