How I played with the wrong kids on the school yard and cofounded a - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

How I played with the wrong kids on the school yard and cofounded a tech bank By Peter Grosskopf

This talk is a story about me, change and technology <3 2

Hi, I’m Peter. I’m a Banker! Developer, founder, creative guy Joined solarisBank end of 2015 as CTO 3

Slow Hard to change course Old fashioned Inflexible services High fixed costs Traditional Bank Old technology

Legacy Systems Mergers Lack of Innovation Waterfall Hierarchies and Silos Compliance Driven „Innovators Dilemma“

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Why do humans leave something good behind? 7

„This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.“ * * Winston Churchill 8

FULL TIME EMPLOYMENT #WTF 9

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Bank Startup 11

Need to change … 12

How to found a bank?

How to found a bank? First: find a team Second: create a lot of paperwork to apply for a license Wait: think about a business model first

Customers want services anytime anywhere ACCESS 
 anyone, anything, anywhere, any device DATA & CONVENIENCE 
 TRANSPARENCY 
 simple, one click, innovative real-time, prediction, transparency PERSONAL & SOCIAL 
 ADVICE 
 collaboration, sharing experts, peers, friends individual & personal

Fintechs have started to unbundle products and services traditionally offered by banks Deposit Payment Deposit Factoring Saving Payment Mobile Saving Customers Bank eMoney Lending Trading Lending Trade Product centric Unbundling of products Traditional banks with huge challenges FinTechs disintermediate value chain ▪ Changed customer behavior ▪ Price, information and product transparency ▪ Lack of innovation ▪ Niche solutions in several product areas ▪ Bad advice & own product bias ▪ Bank accounts & aggregation ▪ Branch based ▪ Loans, savings, payments, asset management ▪ Legacy systems ▪ Price comparison engines, marketplaces & brokerages emerging ▪ High fixed costs ▪ B2B and B2C business models ▪ Paralysis through over-compliance etc. 16

solarisBank as the first European Banking-as-a-Platform END CUSTOMERS PARTNERS APIs Banking as a Platform Connects partners with the Digital-enabler for world of banking and Banks & 
 Strict neutrality through financial services. Bank-enabler B2B2X-approach for digital companies Banking, payment and Open State-of- 
 value-added services the-art APIs SUPPLIERS Fast go-to- 
 Customization due 
 market solutions to modularity Same DNA as tech companies 17

solarisBank as the first European Banking-as-a-Platform received German founded in headquartered in banking license March 2016 Berlin in under 10 months about 70 already employees passporting into (> 50% tech) five countries 18

Modular approach fits diversity of partner business models E-money eMoney bundle Accounts Trx license Modular services overview Add-On’s, e.g. Credit bundle Electr. 
 Entity Accounts Scoring KYC Trx Sign. • Partner interface • 3 rd Party Apps Electr. 
 Accounts bundle Entity Accounts KYC Trx Cards KYC Sign. Trx Accounts processes License Risk & Electr. 
 Savings bundle Entity KYC Accounts Trx Cards Sign. umbrella Lending Other services Partner use case n Brick 1 Brick 2 Brick 3 Brick 4 Brick 5 solarisBank components are combinable to respond to business needs of diversified portfolio of partners: ▪ Full flexibility for Partners due to modular services ▪ Adding other / new services always possible at low cost / complexity 19

D E P R C E - A T Start small and simple (early 2016) E D Success Factors: • Ruby based • Monolith first • Domain Layer as Core Asset • First revenue one month after EZB full banking license got issued 20

Partner Architecture Iteration #2 SSL Auth Token solarisBank Data Center 
 InnovoCloud Auth Proxy Partner UID Authentication Policy Whitelist Authorization REST JSON API Core Services Escrow Services Credit Services Policy Check Policy Check Partner Person Account Transaction Item Vendor Service Service Service Service Service Service TAN Ident. Credit 
 … 
 Service Service Service Service Data Persistence Services IDnow API SMS API CBS 
 Database ORM Client Client Client FinTech IDnow SMS CBS External Services 21 Systems Server Server Server

Next stop: Microservices 22

Event Sourcing • „Capture all changes to an application state as a sequence of events“ (Martin Fowler) • Buffering, Ordering, Replay, … • Loosely coupled services (messages vs. RPC) • Fits well to our business model 23

Architecture Iteration #3 API Gateway Authentication Service Authorization Service Digital Banking E-Money Credits Savings Bundles Partner Person Account Transaction Ident. Credit 
 TAN … 
 Services Service Service Service Service Service Service Service Service Event Sourcing / async Core Banking System External Services 24

„Modern“ Tech Platform 25

„Modern“ Tech Platform Static-ly typed compiled language invented 
 Benefits of a polyglot platform approach: by Google to offer an alternative to C + Right tool for the job + Very fast (as C) + Attract more developers + Small deployments + Adopt new trends and technologies of 
 + Type-safe the future. Avoid monoculture + Many users + Used by Google ;-) - Great for many use case not any Polyglot Platform Approach Elixir Ruby Dynamic, object-oriented, interpreted language Dynamic, functional, compiled Erlang-based 
 + Big knowledge base within company language designed for building scalable applications + Huge open source community + Fast and stable + Easy to learn, read and understand + Born in Ruby community + Great for APIs and Domain Models + Great for concurrency - slower in benchmarks (Interpreted) + Efficiency 26 - Process based (horizontal) scaling - New in production

Rollout Strategy / Deployment Setup Push code Push code Push code Push code Build Docker 
 Build Docker 
 Build Docker 
 Testing Staging Sandbox Production Image Image Image Push Image to Push Image to End-to-end 
 Push Image to End-to-end 
 Push Image to End-to-end 
 End-to-end 
 local Registry local Registry Tests local Registry Tests local Registry Tests Tests Rollout to servers Rollout to servers Rollout to servers Rollout to servers GoCD Pipelines 27

„State-of-the-art“ Dev Organization Vision Autonomy, Mastery, 
 Principles Purpose Services / 
 Teams Platform Roadmap -> 28

Why I love what I do? • Huge business potential for a challenger bank • Enforced professionality driven by compliance and regulation • Many opportunities to make things different (full automation, „compliance as code“) • Big technical challenge • Parents love it 😄 29

My learning over the years • Don’t reinvent the wheel in the beginning of a project • Build for now, prepare for later • Create a fast-adopting change-embracing culture • Embrace change. Be curious. Try new things. 30

Play with other kids. You can learn from them and discover new lands 31

Thank you for your attention! Peter Grosskopf CTO 
 peter.grosskopf@solarisbank.de @peterlih