Roadmap for building a scalable Fintech entity from the scratch amidst the rise of teen centric pocket money apps in India

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

1. How has scalability of apps grown to be a top priority for fintech entities like yours? Could you take us through any industry roadblocks which you faced while building muvin?

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

This is a must, especially if an app has a dependency on third party APIs (Application Programming Interface). It is even more important to design the system, which does not get impacted due to third-party API scalability issues. Such issues create a bad experience for the end customers.  A good scalable system should also be auto-recoverable, reconcilable by design as it is highly inefficient to monitor failures/recon manually or solve it by adding more people. Scalability is all about doing more with less resources, be it 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 larger 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 teens.

With an aim to enable teenagers and young adults to gain financial literacy and independence, muvin offers a smooth neo-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-powered experience for its users with products customized and personalized to the youth needs. muvin offers a one-of-a-kind prepaid card for kids, muvinCard, that lets children get the best of both worlds – online and offline payments. muvin enables the youth to experience a new way of banking that comes with numerous features and perks as below:

• muvin aims to build the essence of financial independence by encouraging learning through managing their money themselves and encourages saving through savings goals.
• muvin lets children categorize the spending allowing them to analyze the transactions and lets them understand where the money is being spent. For younger children, muvin alerts parents on transactions in real-time and allows parents to set transaction limits to manage the spending of their children thus developing responsible financial habits.
• To make the app more user-friendly and engaging, muvin lets children learn and gain financial literacy as they make transactions by getting access to elements of money matters through engaging and relevant short-form videos and short articles with content created specifically for the young audience.

Our technology infrastructure and architecture ensures that the platform scales based on user growth, personalizes 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 the fintech apps? Any insights which you may 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 like scalability, configurability, extensibility, retry-ability and abstraction should be addressed from the very beginning. The best example of a scalable architecture is the UPI, which has scaled to billions of transactions. At muvin we have created a well-oiled transactions system, which is horizontally scalable and enables business to scale.

4. How are technology innovations being used by pocket money apps like muvin for making the experience of personal finance more intuitive, personalized and empowering for its key consumer audience?

For a pocket money app like muvin innovation is all about building features which are very simple to use and easily understandable by our end customers. It is also important to innovate around the value added services, which helps the customers do more using a single app. muvin application brings the ability for the Indian teens to learn how to spend and save money thus making real world decisions taking their first step towards understanding how to manage money responsibly.

We have curated an exhaustive library of original content to demystify concepts related to personal finance. muvin rewards users during their learning journey thus gamifying their learning experience and teaching the teens money management skills

5. What role is technology playing in managing risk in the age of digital identity?

With digital identity there is an increased risk of identity theft and impersonation. Technology has to play a more proactive role and should be able to prevent any data theft by applying best of the security practices and use of AI to be able to safeguard against any attempts of data theft. The customers should be given control to review the activity around their digital identity and selectively give permissions for third-party applications to access the same.