How Banks and Fintech Apps Innovate (And Compete) Around Cloud-Native

Modern fintech apps like Betterment and Robinhood push the limits of what consumers expect from banking apps. One of their biggest competitive advantages is that they can support real-time decision-making and transaction processing, providing users with instant decisions, personalized experiences, and feature-rich applications. To keep up, banks and financial services organizations need to embrace digital transformations that enable them to innovate around transaction services. These services can include dynamic pricing, hyper-personalized content, real-time business process optimization, and fraud detection. Financial services organizations have a wealth of transaction data. By finding an efficient way to gather, store, automate, and analyze this data, they can gain invaluable customer insights and build solutions that are miles ahead of the competition. This is where cloud-native infrastructures come in – making data more accessible and providing timely insights to enable automation and guide informed decision-making. Banks need to adopt these modern, cloud-native data platforms, replacing the likes of Oracle, IBM DB2, NoSQL, and other legacy systems. Cloud-native = containers + microservices. Another key benefit of cloud-native architecture for financial services organizations is that applications are distributed and made up of loosely coupled microservices. This provides low latency, even when operating at high-volumes, by moving the data closer to the source. Distributed applications also provide better uptime since data stored in a centralized location is vulnerable to outages or attacks and makes it easier for banks to add new state-of-the-art capabilities and services.  By building a cloud-native infrastructure, financial services organizations can create a dynamic environment composed of independent processes that all work together seamlessly and make it easy to add new features. Beyond transaction services, cloud-native architectures are driving innovation in areas like data science, IoT, and edge computing. What to look for in your cloud-native database: performance, flexibility, scale, and Kubernetes. Banks and financial services organizations have found, however, that moving to a cloud-native architecture can introduce new challenges. Legacy data platforms were not designed to handle the complexity of distributed environments or large numbers of services and often break down when stretched. To fill this gap, financial services organizations should adopt a flexible database solution that provides easy access to the transaction data needed to add new innovative and personalized services. It should be for the cloud built from the ground up to take advantage of the scale and resilience yet capable of being deployed on-premises or across hybrid or multi-cloud environments. It should also be easy to add new nodes for scale and automatically rebalance and replicate data throughout a distrusted system. Some of the critical database features that financial organizations should look for include: ACID compliance and consistent transactions, Built for Kubernetes, Compatibility, Support for multi-national customers. By combining these features, banks and financial services organizations can quickly and efficiently create new transaction services and personalized features. One such database is CockroachDB, the cloud-native, distributed SQL database that provides next-level consistency, ultra-resilience, data locality, and massive scale to modern cloud applications.