Event-Driven Architecture for a Leading Fintech Provider
Fintech & Payments // Designing and implementing a standardised, observable, and resilient event-driven architecture to support a high-volume payment processing ecosystem.
The Challenge
- Inconsistent data and race conditions between services due to point-to-point API calls.
- Difficulty troubleshooting issues that spanned multiple service boundaries.
- High cognitive load for developers trying to understand the complex, interconnected system.
- Brittle integrations that were prone to failure during downstream service outages.
The Approach
Analysis & Standardisation
- Audited the existing service communication patterns and identified key pain points.
- Designed a standardised event schema and message contract for all inter-service communication.
- Selected and championed a unified message broker (e.g., AWS SNS/SQS) for the organisation.
Observability Foundation
- Implemented a structured logging standard across all services.
- Introduced distributed tracing to provide a unified view of requests as they flow through the system.
- Built centralised dashboards to monitor key business transactions and system health.
Pattern Implementation & Enablement
- Refactored a critical business workflow to use event-driven patterns (e.g., Saga pattern) to improve resilience.
- Developed libraries and documentation to make it easy for engineering teams to adopt the new standards.
- Hosted workshops and pairing sessions to evangelize the benefits of the new architecture.
What We Built
Architecture
- Event-Driven System Blueprint
- Standardised Event/Message Schema
- Observability Strategy
Governance
- API & Event Design Guidelines
- Structured Logging Standard
- Distributed Tracing Best Practices
Enablement
- Internal libraries for event production/consumption
- Boilerplate service templates
- Architectural Decision Records (ADRs)
Outcomes
Dramatically improved system resilience; outages in one service no longer cause cascading failures.
Reduced Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) for production incidents by 50% through improved observability.
Increased developer velocity by providing clear, standardised patterns for building and integrating services.
Created a single source of truth for key business events, enabling more reliable data analysis and reporting.
Tech & Tools
Key Principles
- Emit Events, Don't Call APIs
- Smart Endpoints, Dumb Pipes
- Choreography over Orchestration
- Log What Matters
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