Can serverless fix fintech's scaling problem?

Technology leaders in the financial services sector constantly struggle with the daily challenges of balancing cost, performance, and security — the constant demand for high availability means that even a minor system outage could lead to significant financial and reputational losses. Add to this the escalating costs of maintaining legacy systems, which often act as bottlenecks for scalability. 

Therefore, back in 2019, when I served as the chief architect of a mid-size commercial bank I was looking at a few options that could enable the technology teams to continue and deliver value-driven features at a high velocity: accelerating cloud transformation, robotic process automation, business process automation and serverless computing to name a few. The latter option had emerged as a compelling solution, offering the promise of enhanced agility, reduced operational costs, and seamless scalability. 

With serverless components, there is no need to manage infrastructure, and the inbuilt tracing, logging, monitoring and debugging make it easy to run these workloads in production and maintain service levels. The built-in elasticity in serverless computing architecture makes it particularly appealing for unpredictable workloads and amplifies developers’ productivity by letting developers focus on writing code and optimizing application design industry benchmarks, providing additional justification for this hypothesis. McKinsey highlights that serverless architecture enables companies to overcome traditional IT transformation obstacles, offering cost reductions of around 60% and facilitating access to ecosystem functionalities.