Here at Devengo, for most of us as developers, this is our first experience in the fintech sector. As we all know, it is a sector that has exploded in recent years and has become an ecosystem full of variety, with players as different as services for individuals, tools for companies or directly full-fledged banks.

It is not surprising that many IT professionals like us have seen in this sector a great opportunity to solve interesting problems with great impact on people’s lives, such as the management and movement of money.

On this occasion, we bring our testimony as developers, this being our first time delving into this world, with all the challenges that working with money entails.

Solving Problems

After having gone through different sectors such as solar energy, the creation of HR tools or interactive experiences for streamers, our career has led us to land in the fintech world.

What attracted us to enter this sector was the capital importance of the back-end within it. From our point of view, what we enjoy most about our profession is solving logical-mathematical problems such as reducing the complexity of pieces of software through refactoring techniques, improving the performance of a system or making architectural decisions in a codebase.

It seemed to us that these are precisely some of the most present problems in the daily life of a company, such as Devengo, whose main activity is to move the greatest amount of money in the shortest possible time. After these last few years we can safely say that we were not wrong.

In our day-to-day life at Devengo, the most important and differentiating part of our work is solving problems. To do this we need to have a systematic method that allows us to move in the desired direction. When it comes to managing money, the first solution we usually think of is not always the optimal one and we need to go much deeper, assessing costs/benefits, avoiding pre-established trends and squeezing our stack to get its full potential. In this way, solving complex problems becomes a more straightforward and rewarding experience.

Given that our system is essentially a critical one, in which any unwanted situation has money as the main actor, it is essential to work in a balanced manner and carry out exhaustive testing, always keeping in mind a common framework to minimize errors. We also frequently dedicate resources to monitoring and automating everyday processes to reduce our margin for error. In this way we achieve full confidence in the solutions that reach the production environment.

Speed and Accuracy are Non-Negotiable

Another peculiarity of working with money is that it is not possible to use approximation methods in the vast majority of situations. This directly closes the door to many scalability solutions that involve sacrificing precision to gain performance. It’s just not an option in our case.

This fact forces us to look for alternative methods to fight for every millisecond of response time by optimizing queries, denormalizing columns, creating indexes in a smart way and, in general, improving our architecture. It is no coincidence that many of the performance improvements we apply are aimed at database queries. This is usually the point at which it usually adds more latency to the resolution of requests that arrive at our servers, so we tackle that matter head-on.

Apart from that we also explore different improvements such as caching strategies to save redundant queries whenever possible, thus reducing API response times even further.

Security is crucial

The importance of security in fintech cannot be underestimated. Here at Devengo, we process sensitive financial information, such as bank account details and personally identifiable information. As such, we are prime targets for cybercriminals seeking to exploit vulnerabilities in our systems. A breach in a fintech company can have devastating consequences, including loss of money, damage to our reputation and, of course, legal implications.

We developers must implement security measures to ensure customers continue entrusting us with their most sensitive financial information. The measure we adopt form a multi-layered approach that includes encryption, authentication, access control, and monitoring. However, the story doesn’t end with that, it is also essential for a payments company to adhere to industry regulations and standards which are way more restrictive than regular technological companies.

Conclusions

In short, as developers in a technology company, at Devengo we try to solve problems in the best possible way with the tools we have at our disposal. Taking this into account, we must never allow ourselves to lose focus on the most important thing of all: behind the code and the money, there are people; and it is our responsibility to treat them with care.

Developers looking for new and exciting challenges should consider joining our industry. To succeed in fintech, they must stay up to date on the latest trends in both finance and technology, collaborate with experts, and continually hone their problem-solving skills. Embracing creativity, adaptability and learning will ultimately drive success in the dynamic and rapidly expanding world of fintech. Joining this sector can lead to profound changes in the financial landscape on a global scale.

Make sure to find us on Twitter and LinkedIn to stay up to date with what our team is doing in the developer and fintech world.