Webinar recap - 4G Capital’s Cloud transformation journey

On Tuesday, May 7, we had the distinct pleasure of hosting a live webinar with Edgar Rivera, CTO of 4G Capital, sharing how 4G Capital built a future-proof back end architecture for their fintech application. 4G Capital is a user of Cerbos Hub. Their banking application offers micro-loans to small businesses and vendors in Kenya and Uganda, providing working capital to entrepreneurs.

Industry trends

Banking applications need to deliver user experiences on par with Google and Netflix

When asked about some of the drivers of modernization in Fintech, Edgar said that customer demand for high-quality user experience was a strong factor. When a Bank’s primary medium of interaction with a customer is a mobile phone, they are inevitably being compared to every other tech giant’s app. So in order to be competitive, user experience, and rapid improvement of user experience, needs to be a high priority.

Don’t jump on the AI bandwagon if you don’t have a strong foundational API authorization strategy.

Edgar and Alex reflected on the burgeoning hype and pressure to incorporate AI features these days. Edgar’s perspective is that before you add an AI program to your application, you need to be sure that the infrastructural pathways in your application are secure, and that the rules governing how the different systems communicate with each other are invulnerable.

Top priorities for 4G Capital’s cloud transformation

Build something that can be changed quickly.

Edgar wanted his team to deliver frequent releases, to constantly test and iterate features, constantly improve user experience, and smoothly adapt to changing regulatory requirements in the markets where they operate.

Build something that is auditable and secure.

Clear and comprehensive audit logs not only facilitate compliance but also help product and business-side stakeholders understand what’s happening in the back end of the application, improving communication between teams.

Access controls need to be better than just one ‘user’ role and one ‘manager’ role.

4G wanted their access controls to fit the real-life use cases of the financial operations that are taking place in their application, and the different user types of the application. They weren’t going to settle for a ‘set it and forget it’ approach. “Fine-grained access control is a constant thing,” Edgar said. Users and employees come and go, and the regulatory environment changes all the time, especially in fintech. You want your product to have the adaptability of a live organism.

How they did it

During the webinar, Edgar took us through three stages of his cloud transformation process, moving from AWS to Google Cloud. He shared diagrams of 4G’s back-end architecture in its ‘before’ state, which they discovered would be prohibitively expensive to scale. Then he showed a diagram of the transitional state of their architecture, showing how they set up their different services to continue performing optimally as they begin to move their whole system over to Google Cloud. And he shared a future state diagram showing the arrangement of services and systems that they are working toward, and how it will improve response times, scalability, and adaptability.

Among the first improvements they saw during their transition was a savings of a quarter million dollars per year on their authorization system alone, thanks to the stateless, lightweight design of Cerbos. The diagrams are really best delivered in a ‘show and tell’ format, so be sure to watch the recording!

A big thank you to Edgar Rivera for sharing his experience with us. 4G Capital’s story is a great example of forward-thinking software design.

Transcript of webinar

Alex: Oh, excellent. So we shall begin. So welcome everyone. Good morning, afternoon, evening from wherever in the world you are. Very glad you are joining us today for this Cerbos webinar about the future proofing fintech in the age of microservices and the cloud. So just by way to kick off, we will go through a bit of an intro to speak about kind of the future of fintech.

Touching particularly on like why authorization is kind of the number one security risk facing this, the, the industry today. And then we're very lucky to have Edgar joining us from 4G there. He's going to take us through kind of their journey and their transformation. Around bringing their stack up to meet their new requirements around authorization.

Main insights from Edgar Rivera

• We operate mostly in Kenya and Uganda, and we do micro lending.
• Our focus was on delivering a best user experience and improving our technologies to provide working capital to entrepreneurs.
• Transitioning from AWS to Google Cloud allowed us to remove bottlenecks and reposition our infrastructure effectively.
• We have seen substantial cost reductions with major improvements in flexibility and adaptability in our authorization control.

Conclusion

4G Capital's experience demonstrates crucial lessons on the intersection of fintech, cloud transformation, and effective authorization strategies. The emphasis on flexibility, security, and efficiency in their transition is informative for other organizations considering similar paths.