Monzo

Building a Modern Bank Backend

SPEAKER
Matt Heath 

ABSTRACT
Traditionally applications have been built as monoliths; single applications which become larger and more complex over time, which limit our ability to react to change. An example of this is the banking industry where mergers and acquisitions between banks have lead to a patchwork of different systems & technologies that cost billions of dollars per year to maintain. As a result, the pace of innovation in the banking industry has slowed to a crawl.

At Monzo we're building a new kind of bank, a digital bank that belongs in the 21st century, using common open source technologies. This talk will cover how we’re developing new core banking systems from scratch backed by a microservice platform written mainly in Go, using open source technologies and tools including Docker and Kubernetes. We'll look at why Go is perfectly suited to this, our architectural decisions, common pitfalls to avoid, and how microservice architectures can vastly increase both the velocity of development teams and the scalability and fault tolerance of our systems.

SPEAKERS BIO
Matt Heath is an engineer at Monzo, a new kind of digital bank, where he uses a range of open source technologies such as Go and Cassandra to build the fault tolerant, highly available platform that underpins the Monzo application. Prior to this Matt was worked as as the Technical Lead of Hailo's global microservice platform, migrating legacy PHP & Java applications to a fully automated globally distributed application which ran across three continents.