Digital adoption in India's fintech ecosystem: Experts discuss how application speed and scale are redefining financial services

The digital world operates at hyperspeed. To thrive in this fast-paced environment, organisations must master the art of high-concurrency application development. But what does it truly take to build systems that can handle millions of users without a hiccup?

A high-octane, closed-door round table discussion hosted by Volt Active Data and YourStory brought together industry leaders to delve into the challenges and opportunities presented by high-concurrency applications in the financial technology landscape, with a particular focus on the Indian fintech industry.

Volt Active Data contributed to the roundtable with the participation of Fahad Khan, Sales Director – APAC and Biplab Banerjee, Principal Solution Architect. The event also welcomed Neeloy Majumder, COO – Technology of Tata Motors Finance, and other BFSI industry leaders.

Participants shared their experience with growing business requirements for digital customer applications. Digital adoption has grown exponentially across banking, payments, loyalty, trading, ecommerce and customer support engagement. A festive sale event on ecommerce websites creates high concurrency for payment processing systems with failure rates. Growth in equity trading has driven pressure on trading platforms ending up with outages or glitches causing huge losses. The discussion highlighted the critical role of low-latency transaction processing for these applications.

Legacy architectures have slow multilayer processing which results in high latency or downtimes. Participants discussed the challenges of processing data within legacy environments and explored potential solutions for continuous intelligence, modern transaction processing, stateful stream processing and hybrid approaches.

Digital adoption has brought both opportunities and challenges. Enterprises have the opportunity to engage faster and better with customers by personalising content and experience. However, this also brings challenges for fraud prevention, seamless performance, and zero downtime.

The complexity of processing high-speed transactional data to extract value in real time—which can help capitalise on opportunities or prevent risks—is the key requirement for the new modern consumer-facing applications. Speakers agreed on highlighting the need for faster transactional data processing with validation, veracity, and real-time processing.

India's fintech industry in focus

Experts from various fintechs shared the unique challenges faced by the Indian fintech industry. With digital adoption peaking after demonetisation and the pandemic, all applications are touching their peak concurrency, stressing the underlying transaction processing solutions. Participants stressed the need for solutions that can process data, identify real-time insights, enable fraud prevention, and scale.

The exponential growth of data, coupled with the proliferation of new financial applications, is creating unprecedented opportunities. To fully capitalise on this landscape, fintech systems must be built on a foundation of scalable technologies and architectures that can effortlessly accommodate increasing transaction volumes and evolving customer demands.

To transition from a reactive stance of detecting fraud and addressing customer complaints to a proactive approach of prevention and experience optimisation, participants stressed the imperative of enhancing data processing with consistency.

The road ahead

Participants unanimously agreed that modern data processing strategies are essential for building high-performance applications that can meet the demands of India's rapidly growing digital economy. By investing in data infrastructure, leveraging emerging technologies, and fostering collaboration between technology providers and financial institutions, the industry can overcome these challenges and unlock new opportunities.

Key takeaways from the discussion included:

• The critical importance of low latency data processing with integrity in high-concurrency applications.
• Legacy architecture needs to evolve to support faster processing and scale
• Applications should be built with real-time data processing to address issues such as fraud prevention and personalisation.
• Fintech should capitalise on data to drive business growth and efficiency.
• The specific challenges faced by the Indian banking industry, including scalability, fraud prevention, and real-time operations.

As the industry continues to evolve, addressing these challenges will be crucial for organisations seeking to build scalable, resilient, and customer-centric applications.