Migration Challenges for FinTechs

Migrating a FinTech to the cloud, specifically on AWS, involves careful consideration of various non-functional requirements like cost, scalability, security, business continuity, and regulatory compliance. Unlike traditional financial institutions, FinTech companies face unique challenges due to their often complex on-premises setups and stringent privacy demands. Zühlke recommends a phased, incremental migration approach, which helps in managing these challenges by aligning technical upgrades with business strategy and ensuring long-term support and maintainability. This strategy allows FinTechs to smoothly transition to the cloud while maintaining service continuity and preparing for scalable growth. 

Working with a FinTech, Zühlke follows a structured phased approach where technology and AWS services choices are considered and made. A typical phasing for a FinTech looks like this: 

1. Evaluation phase: 

This can be under appreciated but it is vital to spend the time evaluating and planning. This is both technical but also creates internal buy-in with the client for the journey ahead. This will involve a comprehensive review of existing systems which allows for the identification of the best AWS services to employ. 

2. Infrastructure design:  

Zühlke commonly leverages Terraform, complemented by AWS CloudFormation as per need, for meticulously modelling and establishing cloud environments that are precisely tailored to meet the unique needs of their clients. This allows for a more robust and flexible infrastructure setup, aligning perfectly with client-specific requirements. 

3. Migration execution:  

The critical application components will in many cases be migrated to Amazon EC2 instances, while data can be transitioned to Amazon RDS and Amazon S3 for structured storage and file storage respectively. 

4. Integration and real-time operations:  

This is crucial for a real-time FinTech business application and a very successful implementation that Zühlke would recommend would leverage Amazon MQ for message broker services, ensuring seamless communication across migrated applications. 

5. Monitoring: 

A successful start-up requires mastery over two critical aspects: cost management and the ability to scale effectively. Amazon CloudWatch emerges as an excellent tool in this context, offering extensive monitoring capabilities that can significantly aid in achieving these objectives. 

6. Optimisation: 

The ability to scale rapidly in response to both short- and long-term growth in demand is part of the terrain for a FinTech start-up and the elasticity of AWS Auto Scaling is often the best answer to the trade-offs for scaling and cost. 

7. Team empowerment:  

It is very important to not forget people in any migration and implementation project. Zühlke will generally start by creating joint teams with a start-up as this is the best way to transfer knowledge and embed the know-how that goes beyond the textbooks. However, the formal transfer of knowledge is also important and Zühlke will, post-migration, host dedicated sessions focused on transferring knowledge about AWS tools, run books, documentation etc. so ensuring that a client’s team can independently capitalise on their new infrastructure and application. 

Overall, the challenges and complexity of working with young, fast-growing companies are tremendously simplified by using the AWS cloud services that already exist and have been tailored for great performance and flexibility.