Roadmap for building a scalable Fintech entity from scratch amidst the rise of youth-centric wallet apps in India

CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Mr. Ashok Ayengar, CTO of muvin

1. How has app scalability grown to be a top priority for fintech entities like yours? Can you take us through some industry roadblocks you encountered while building muvin?

In today’s digital world, technology should be built in accordance with business objectives. As technology has accelerated customer acquisition and global market expansion, scalability has become increasingly critical for businesses. It has gained popularity especially among the fintech ecosystem to carry out the larger mission of digitization. To do that, financial institutions require a scalable architecture in place. It is the system’s ability to cope and continue to perform optimally under an increasing workload.

This is a must, especially if an app relies on third-party APIs (Application Programming Interface). It is even more important to design the system, which is not affected due to scalability issues with third-party API. Such problems create a bad experience for end customers. A good scalable system should also be able to recover automatically, by design unified, as it is very inefficient to monitor errors/rebuild manually or solve it by adding more people. Scalability is about doing more with less resources, whether it’s engineering, operations or customer support. –

A system that scales well will be able to maintain, or even increase, its level of performance or efficiency even when subjected to greater operational demands.

2. What is the roadmap/framework for building a scalable fintech app? Please elaborate in light of muvin as a pocket money app for teenagers.

With a goal to enable teenagers and young adults to gain financial literacy and independence, muvin offers a smooth new banking experience through an instant zero balance wallet and physical prepaid card for your child. muvin offers an easy-to-understand, intuitive, friction-free and education-driven experience for its users with products adapted and personalized to the needs of young people. muvin offers a unique prepaid card for children, muvinCard, which allows children to get the best of both worlds – online and offline payments. muvin allows the youth to experience a new way of banking that comes with a number of features and benefits as below:

• muvin aims to build the essence of financial independence by encouraging learning through managing your money yourself and encouraging savings through savings goals.
• muvin allows children to categorize their expenses so they can analyze the transactions and allows them to understand where the money is being spent. For younger children, muvin notifies parents of transactions in real time and allows parents to set transaction limits to manage their children’s spending and thus develop responsible financial habits.
• To make the app more user-friendly and engaging, muvin allows children to learn and gain financial literacy when making transactions by accessing elements of money matters through engaging and relevant short-form videos and short articles with content created specifically for the young audience.

Our technological infrastructure and architecture ensures that the platform scales based on user growth, adapts the experience based on user profile and is built to ensure security of user information.

3. What are the benefits of adopting a scalable architecture for fintech apps? Any insights you might want to share specific to a market like India?

For any technology company, it is important to have the right architecture in place. Some of the core pillars such as scalability, configurability, extensibility, retries and abstraction should be addressed from the very beginning. The best example of a scalable architecture is UPI, which has scaled to billions of transactions. At muvin, we have created a well-oiled transaction system, which is horizontally scalable and enables the business to scale.

4. How are technology innovations being used by wallet apps like muvin to make the personal finance experience more intuitive, personal and empowering for the core consumer audience?

For a wallet app like muvin, innovation is about building features that are very easy to use and easy to understand for our end customers. It is also important to innovate around value-added services, which help customers do more using a single app. The muvin application empowers Indian teenagers to learn how to spend and save money, thereby making real-world decisions and take their first step towards understanding how to manage money responsibly.

We’ve curated an exhaustive library of original content to demystify concepts related to personal finance. muvin rewards users during their learning journey, recording their learning experience and teaching teens money management skills

5. What role does technology play in managing risk in the age of digital identity?

With digital identity, there is an increased risk of identity theft and impersonation. The technology needs to play a more proactive role and should be able to prevent data theft using the best security practices and the use of AI to be able to protect against data theft attempts. Customers should gain control over the activity surrounding their digital identity and selectively grant permissions for third-party applications to access the same.