Production-Ready FinTech Systems: Architecture, Scale & Security

## ⏱️ 3‑Hour Agenda

| Segment | Duration | Focus |
| ------- | -------- | ----- |
| | 15 min | Why FinTech? Challenges & trends |
| | 45 min | Monolith → Microservices → Serverless |
| | 40 min | Event sourcing, CQRS, security by design |
| ☕ Break | 10 min | — |
| | 40 min | Bottlenecks, migrations, scale |
| | 30 min | Teams design a FinTech micro-service |
| | 20 min | Tools, best practices, next steps |

### 1. 🔍 Welcome & Context (15 min)

• The FinTech landscape: payments, wallets, crypto
• Key demands: performance, reliability, regulation
• Overview of session flow and objectives

### 2. 🏗️ FinTech Architecture Patterns (45 min)

• Monolith (e.g., PayPal early): pros & cons
• Microservices (e.g., Venmo): decomposing for scale
• Serverless (e.g., Chime): autoscaling & cost-efficiency
• Hybrid/hub-and-spoke (e.g., Nubank): mixing approaches

***

### 3. 🔐 Key Design Principles (40 min)

1. Asynchronous & Event-Driven flows (Kafka, RabbitMQ)
2. Event Sourcing + CQRS: reliable ledgers & materialized views
3. Security & Compliance by design: IAM, encryption, PCI/GDPR
4. Resilience: retries, idempotency, circuit breakers, observability

***

### ☕ Break (10 min)

***

### 4. 📚 Real-World Case Studies (40 min)

• Database bottleneck audit: MongoDB freeze at 15 RPS → fix with microservices
• Legacy revamp: Bank system → cloud microservices & CI/CD
• Cloud scaling: AWS wallet launch 0 → 750K users with auto-scaling, Kubernetes, monitoring

***

### 5. 👥 Interactive Studio (30 min)

Task: Design a service (e.g., Payments, Fraud Detection, Wallet) focusing on:

• Architecture pattern
• Event handling
• Security & compliance
• Tech stack

Teams present core design in 5 minutes.

***

### 6. 🧭 Wrap-Up & Q&A (20 min)

• Revisit architecture choices and trade-offs
• Share FinTech tools and frameworks: Apache Kafka, Axon, Kubernetes, AWS Lambda, Datadog
• Provide next steps and community resources
• Encourage follow-up via GitHub/Discord for continued learning

***

## ✅ Why This Session Delivers

• Explores top FinTech architectures and real tradeoffs
• Combines theory with hands-on strategy
• Leaves attendees inspired to build secure, scalable systems
• Ideal for developers aiming to architect production-grade solutions