What – or who – makes up a good user experience? As the rates of digitization and innovation increase at a quicker pace than they did pre-pandemic, the time is now for financial services to meet consumer’s evolving expectations. But, what goes into making the streamlined, simplified banking experience that so many have come to expect?
For a company to be able to deliver a good user experience, (and, in the case of FISPAN, a good banking experience!) initial responsibility can fall to those who write and maintain the program’s software, i.e., developers. However, it doesn’t stop there: to create a good user experience, the people who write and maintain software (again those developers!) need to have a good experience as well. This is where the Platform team comes into play.
João Luiz Vieira (JV), a Software Engineer at FISPAN, dives into the Platform team’s mission and how they help developers (and, ultimately, you!) access better banking solutions.
Supporting the Developer’s Magic
The Platform team’s mission is to Serve and Support the Developer’s Magic at FISPAN.
In other words, our central goal is to improve the Developer experience. We help remove roadblocks, paving a clear path for developers to do their magic — deliver the best banking experience!
Developers use development tools and processes to add quality and value to products, such as enhanced customer service and user experiences. Therefore, the Platform team’s goal relates to creating and maintaining a self-service set of tools and processes that allows developers to do their jobs. Like AWS (Amazon Web Services), the Platform team provides Managed Services to the rest of the engineering teams. Through this, the team essentially provides a foundation in which Developers can grow, work, and focus on their business requirements and solutions.
As Sam Newman said in the book Building Microservices, 2nd edition: “A platform that can implement common functionality [...] can deliver huge improvements in productivity and enable teams to take on more responsibility without also having to drastically increase the amount of work they do. In fact, a platform should give teams more bandwidth to focus on delivering features.”
For example, by having a set of tools and processes to help in the development process, the banking team doesn't need to worry about the basic "plumbing" and can focus their energy on developing features to make the banking experience better (focus on delivering the magic!).
Some examples of tools that we (the Platform team) maintain include:
- Development pipelines (this is where code runs to ensure it’s working properly)
- Databases
- Queue services
- Authorization services
- Logging
- Monitoring and alerting services
- Tools for fast software development
Why It’s Just As Important to Focus on the Developer
Just as FISPAN has end users (like accountants, controllers, bookkeepers, and CFOs), so does the Platform team. In the case of the Platform team, our end users are all the other developers of the company.
For the Platform team to succeed in our roles, we place our focus on the developers: we actively go out to find what problems and needs the developers are facing and work with them to get those problems fixed. While focusing on the developers as our clients, we take a product development approach to help build out the platform.
To obtain Developer feedback and ensure clear communication, we use many channels: for example, dedicated channels are placed on our internal communication app. We also have a JIRA project set up for that and we encourage transparency and open communication from the developers.
Building for Resilience
Nature tends to be resilient to crisis in a way that human-created things usually aren’t. While your laptop won’t fix itself when it breaks, your finger will. The ability to respond to crises requires slack and flexibility; something that human-created things lack. So, we have to purposely add resilience to the systems that we develop.
We add resilience in many different ways; one of these ways is to instill multiple instances of redundant service. Should one service fail under this method, there are multiple other instances that can handle the job without any functional interruptions to the customer. Through the use of our own services and tools to achieve multiple layers of redundancy, we deliver business continuity to all of our developers.
Should anything happen to our system, active monitoring and alerting services
are in place to send alerts and information on what is happening. While allowing us to quickly act on any disruptions, we also gain a greater understanding of the problem and its causes.
Delivering Great User Experiences
While not always in the spotlight, the Platform team is the foundation of a great user experience. By focusing on the developer’s experience, the Platform team increases delivery, speed, and efficiency at scale so that teams can focus on the core business requirements and solutions – ultimately, bringing you better banking experiences.
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FISPAN’s Embedded Banking solution brings banking capabilities into your ERP or accounting system, giving you a better user experience. Learn more about how you can easily connect to FISPAN’s solution, here.