Contents

Your CI/CD pipeline should be capable of releasing every three days. 1

Thou shall not reinvent the wheel 1

Valorise your data without compromising. 2

Your infrastructure should be coded and one click away. 3

Thy shall automate menial tasks. 3

Look beyond the desktop foam factors. 3

Thou will find revenue in hopeless place. 4

Thou shall not make user wait. 4

Thou shall pass the test of OWASP. 4

Thou shall have a multi pronged approach for your digital marketing. 4

The Ten Commandments of a digital fin-tech startup

Prelude

Amazon is in a position to release a new feature every minute –  it is amazing to see how a bookseller has become such an important economic engine that has catapulted their CEO to be the world’s richest. It is no longer just an E-Commerce platform- their foray into medicine , cloud computing, intelligent retail outlets , ebook distribution network and whole foods.

today every company wants to be the Amazon of x. in this blog will try to focus on how to become the Amazon of the finance industry.

today digital wallets such as Google Play, apple pay Amazon wallet Paytm are more frequently used then the traditional bank which have have a well-established setup with numerous branches and ATMs. if you are a company and in any particular week if you did not release any feature – prepare to be obsolete.

major players have lost significant amount of market capex due to the lack of timely innovation. you do not see much of Kodak or  Ambassador. most major companies of today are just a ” software”. Uber  is the largest taxi service without any taxi agency, air bnb is the largest room booking platform, Google and Apple may over take traditional car companies to become the largest car producers of automated fleets.

this blog touches Upon A few aspects that allow your company to be nimble, agile, innovative ,competitive and aggressive without compromising on quality.

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Your CI/CD pipeline should be capable of releasing every three days

before we become mature enough to release a new feature every minute let us focus on the bear minimum to be called “relevant”.
you should be in a position to release a new feature every 3 days. the feature could be as small as updating the colour of the webpage   or simplifying a step within a wizard.  but release you must. do not get into the traditional water fall model and lengthy release cycles that span into many months. Big Bang had happened many years ago not a anymore.
your continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline should be capable of releasing at a breakneck pace. dominant the developer has made a well tested feature-  release it.

your infrastructure should also be written as a code. gone are the days where you sit in front of a machine and install every software package by package. you should just have a couple of commands like create new or Run or test or deploy in both infrastructure as well as in software. Amazon is in a position to release a new feature every minute –  it is amazing to see how a bookseller has become such an important economic engine that has catapulted their CEO to be the world’s richest. It is no longer just an E-Commerce platform- their foray into medicine , cloud computing, intelligent retail outlets , ebook distribution network and whole foods.

today every company wants to be the Amazon of x. in this blog will try to focus on how to become the Amazon of the finance industry.

today digital wallets such as Google Play, apple pay Amazon wallet Paytm are more frequently used then the traditional bank which have have a well-established setup with numerous branches and ATMs. if you are a company and in any particular week if you did not release any feature – prepare to be obsolete.

major players have lost significant amount of market capex due to the lack of timely innovation. you do not see much of Kodak or  Ambassador. most major companies of today are just a ” software”. Uber  is the largest taxi service without any taxi agency, air bnb is the largest room booking platform, Google and Apple may over take traditional car companies to become the largest car producers of automated fleets.

this blog touches Upon A few aspects that allow your company to be nimble, agile, innovative ,competitive and aggressive without compromising on quality.
A type CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery) cycle looks like

• Clean
• Install /Dependencies
• Build
• Unit Test
• Coverage
• Sonar
• Checkxmarx
• Package
• Deploy
• Publish

Jenkins pipeline flow is the most preferred way of starting of your continuous integration and continuous delivery process your CI CD platform should not just be able to build the package and generate the exe or the backpackers but it should also be equal to run your test both your unit test integration test and in some cases the UI test.

Since automated UI test takes some time for execution it is generally preferred to run it in the nightly job

As soon as the test pass the package must be generated and uploaded to some on Arti  factory or Nexus repository manager or npm package repository or nuget package manager / Maven repository.

If your build output is a mobile application then your APK or your IPA file could be uploaded on to hockeyapp or xamarin test cloud.

it is from that point your infrastructural service like XL deploy or azure should replace placeholders for your application secrets and send it to your application server such as IAS or Apache or any other http server. Yeah testers and product owner should be able to pick up the build and commence acceptance testing.

Thou shall not reinvent the wheel

• Authentication / Authorization
• Payments
• UI Libraries
• Market Place
• Telephony
• Mailing
• Physical Interface
• Ci / CD
• Device Lab
• Infrastructure
• Storage
• Service Bus

popular reusable libraries (authentication / authorization, payments, UI libraries, market place, telephony, mailing, physical interface, ci / CD, device lab, infrastructure, storage, service bus)

Do not roll out your own authentication framework.  Years of research have gone in to thwart vulnerabilities / holes / protect Resources.  use a known authentication framework like Thinktecture or Azure AD identity services or Amazon cognito – choose one that supports open Id authentication scheme built on top of oauth specifications.

Stripe or PayPal are market leaders in payment systems. Both have “checkout ” type of button as well as an API driven approach.

It is easier to have infrastructure managed as a service via azure, Amazon or Google cloud.

Otp for your two factors or telephony can be leveraged via twilio.

Sauce labs or xamarin test cloud is ideal for testing your application or web application on multiple browsers or device with a myriad foam factor.

Valorise your data without compromising.

• Machine learning (supervised and unsupervised)
• Remember: Meaningful information makes you the king.

Your data could help you to

• Find outliers (fraud transactions, high net worth customers, customers outside their Normal Geo location bounds [on vacation or one random client from Siberia)]
• See surges in incidents.
• Clustering
• Clients of a particular profession making a decision not known Normal to them (hidden revenue)
• Recommendation engine
• Kind of tasks your staff is engaged in.
• NLP (natural Lang recognition)

Your infrastructure should be coded and one click away.

• Use tools like chef / puppet / ansible
• Or Xl Deploy
• Or Azure tools
• Or AWS Sdk

Your infrastructure should be replicable by code – for example

• Create a 64 gb virtual machine with windows server 2016 with 8gb ram
• Machine should have node js v6 with IIS and dot net core

Thy shall automate menial tasks

• Free
  • Node Js
  • Express
  • Robotjs
  • Selenium
  • Web Driver
• Paid
  • Automate Anywhere
  • Blue Prism
  • Ui Path

Look beyond the desktop foam factors

• Always have an API First approach.
• For UI you ought to be available on
  • Desktop (win/mac)
  • tablets
  • Smartphone (Android/IOS)
  • Sms/telephony
  • Watch
  • car
  • Addon applications to existing ecosystems like Excel quickbooks or waze

Thou will find revenue in hopeless place

• Example the airline industry will issue cheap tickets but have multiple ways of making revenue – preferred seats check in baggage Lounge access inflight entertainment.
• Most apps tends to categorise their offerings as free basic medium and premiere.
• One can rely on the shoulders of payment gateways like stripe/ just pay/ PayPal/ Amazon pay/ Google Wallet apple pay

Thou shall not make user wait.

• 5 second application startup
• Asynchronous loading of JavaScript
• Bi application communication like signalr/ websockets
• Lazy loading
• Job scheduler background thread async and await paradigm

Thou shall pass the test of OWASP

• protect your application against
  • sequel injection,
  • denial of service,
  • cross site request forgery,
  • https stripping
  • Open ID connect for your security
  • Reverse engineering protection

Thou shall have a multi pronged approach for your digital marketing

Monthly blogs ,email campaign marketing Instagram post ,YouTube videos ,leverage the help of social influencers, paid Facebook FB outreaches, newspapers, TV advert, Google ads, Amazon Ppc

About the author

With an overall experience of 7 years and masters from CSU, USA Karan possess expertise in numerous domains ranging from .NET MVC/WebApi, Java, web apps and native apps. Created multiple mobile apps in Android, web app, iOS & Win 7.5&8. Microsoft Certified in MVC5. Angular JS certified. Currently I am helping Société Générale with a series of applications as a full stack developer involving Dot Net Core 2.0 WebApi, angular JS, Oracle DB, SSAS cubes, React Web components. Prior to that my stint with Infosys involved creation of an automation framework for VISA client using Node JS. Made multiple proof of solutions around Framework of Commonwealth Bank of Australia from Bangalore utilizing .NET MVC, Angular JS, Node JS and JWT identity protection. After revamping the service access layer of ANZ goMoney Android application, I worked on its Unit test framework, Gradle toolset, Location based services. Following that I had assisted ANZ Wallet team with tap and pay application using NFC, HCE and GCM. Beyond that my services were used to rewrite NAB Mobile App with cutting edge development practices like dependency injection, material design, testing, build and support libraries .I was responsible for crafting a few UI screens and spearheaded the performance initiative for Android app utilized by DirecTv field service technicians via Infosys,Worked in Bank Of America via Infosys in mobile division USA, NC for 2yrs., prior to that- TIBCO, CA. My profile is http://linkedin.com/in/kurtzace, project portfolio is http://be.net/KaranBhandari.

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