We talked in our recent blog post about some of the success stories of FinTechs and banks leveraging the Erlang, Elixir and the BEAM virtual machine – including Vocalink, Goldman Sachs and others. In this post let’s examine a further 5 interesting use cases spanning building a bank from scratch in Elixir to using the most deployed open source message broker in the world (built in Erlang) in one of the world’s largest financial data companies.
Klarna
Why Erlang?
To power the core system
Klarna is the uber-successful European FinTech unicorn that is going from strength to strength in the BNPL space. They operate as an intermediary between customer and agent making it simpler for both to buy – settlement takes place later using any of various payment methods. Klarna’s main payment system has been running for over 10 years, serving millions of customers.
Originally a monolith entirely built in Erlang, Klarna has since moved out to some different services, with a technology stack of Erlang, Scala, Clojure and Haskell, combined with a serverless architecture.
Where Erlang has been key in this success story, is that it has enabled the core Klarna system to demonstrate extremely high availability over the years with zero downtime. Erlang has allowed the flexibility to grow massively and restructure the system without having to stop operating.
Kivra
Why Erlang/Elixir?
For innovative backend services
Kivra exists to develop sustainable and convenient solutions for everyday life. They do this by ensuring the secure, reliable delivery of digital financial information that previously would have been sent in paper form by traditional mail.
They are a fast-growing and ambitious FinTech scaleup operating in Sweden and Finland enabling over 37,000 companies, public authorities and organisations to service 5 million users (including half of the adult Swedish population) with over 200 million important digital documents every year.
A key part of Kivra’s product offering is their Sender Platform, where Kivra’s B2B clients send important content and communications to end-users. Erlang Solutions have worked in close collaboration with Kivra in a fully remote team consisting of backend developers, frontend developers and UX specialists. We provided domain expertise in Erlang/Elixir technologies as well as contributing with advanced modern design and development practices such as design thinking and pair/team programming to deliver the solutions quickly in an iterative and incremental way.
OTP Bank
Why Erlang?
To build modern, digital banking infrastructure
OTP Bank has 13 million customers in central & eastern Europe and has worked closely with us on ambitious projects to disrupt and modernise their model to great success. They were refactoring their complete legacy IT backend system to secure a future-proof full banking infrastructure for secure, reliable, scalable real-time transactions – Erlang was identified as the right tool for the job.
Erlang Solutions were engaged to help with speeding up the delivery of innovative services to their customers by implementing LuErl, a new technology created by Erlang Solution’s engineer and co-creator of Erlang, Robert Virding, to shorten the customer feedback cycle from weeks to hours. The Erlang based immediate payment system was already using elements of the new design and has achieved zero downtime.
Memo Bank
Why Elixir?
To build a scalable reliable banking core system
Memo Bank is the first independent bank to be created in France in the last fifty years. It was founded in 2017 and serves the European small and medium businesses (SMB) market, helping them to manage cash flows and fund their growth as a bank. They provide all the services you’d expect from a business bank, from current accounts to credit lines.
The Memo team chose Elixir as the right tool for the job as building a system that is available anytime, from any device was mission-critical for success. They also have identified Elixir systems’ scalability and availability as necessary to absorb real-time transactions reliably. Read more about Memo Bank’s story on our blog.
SUMMARY
So there you go. These success stories, along with those mentioned in part 1 of this blog series, provide a compelling argument for leveraging the BEAM VM, Erlang and Elixir for all manner of development projects and use cases within FinTech, and there are many more too which we cannot detail due to NDAs.
If you have development needs in the industry then we remain willing and available to offer expert consultancy to help you get your FinTech products to market faster while using fewer resources. You can contact us to speak with one of our expert consultants at any time across time zones.
For a deep dive into fintech trends and how they should inform your tech strategy and decision making, download our whitepaper “Fintech Trends for 2022” here >>
If you want to start a conversation about engaging us for your fintech project or talk about partnering and collaboration opportunities, please send our Fintech Lead, Michael Jaiyeola, an email or connect with him via Linkedin.
