VTB Launches a Microservices Platform For Processing Financial Transactions

VTB Bank is unique in terms of the services it offers its corporate customers, and a large payment hub doing correspondent business with banks in Russia, CIS and far abroad.

PPFT enables electronic messaging exchange within VTB’s payment system as well as with partner banks through both public financial messaging systems and direct interbank channels.

Such platform will allow to quickly connect new financial messaging channels, expand the geography of VTB’s payment system, offer Service Bureau, and eventually improve overall service level and create unique products for bank customers.

PPFT supports international standards on the exchange of financial information, but employs domestic solutions exclusively.

Previously, interbank payment services were carried out based on software from leading global vendors (IBM and Oracle), and were built on an outdated “codeic” architecture.

Last year, VTB faced the task of building a versatile and reliable platform completely independent from foreign technologies to enable information exchange between banks, legal entities and payment systems, and build an architecture that allows adding different rounds and types of financial messages similar to a building kit, without modifying key components of the PPFT system.

The solution was to migrate from “monolithic” to microservices architecture, based on a 100% domestic tech stack, to be rolled out with VTB’s private cloud. Such architecture ensures high reliability, fault tolerance and great scaling potential.

Beside a new program architecture, the microservices architecture has enabled a different approach to forming teams for new services and significantly enhanced time to deployment. The tech stack allows to quickly form dedicated small teams – up to 10-12 experts – to work on a new service with fully autonomous functionality and access to existing technology services on the platform, when needed.

“As a result, we got a state-of-the-art tool to support our interbank settlements and payment services using popular open-source solutions and frameworks built on VTB’s standard private cloud infrastructure. The solution’s reliability is backed by reiterative redundancy both in the cloud and PPFT. Owing to cutting edge engineering practices, we have significantly ramped up the number of releases and reduced time-to-market on services,’” – commented Oleg Boltar, Deputy Head of the Department of settlements automation, VTB Bank.

The project implied an in-depth analysis of solutions based on both open-source platforms and the platforms of big Russian vendors to select the most popular and rapidly growing frameworks. The idea was to not only build a reliable platform, but create a product, which would be compelling for developers and make them want to be part of the project. This approach determined an innovative tech stack used by tech companies all over the world.

The PPFT microservices platform is built on a classic tech stack: Java Spring Boot as a framework tool for developing microservices, Kubernetes for containerization; Apache Kafka scaling tool; Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring; log collection and analysis is implemented on EFK stack – a combination of Elastic Search, Fluentd and Kibana; and Tarantool for cache distribution.

“The system has already been brought into production and helps delivering new services to bank’s customers. With containerization and microservices architecture, we can scale the PPFT and expand the volume of payments with no changes to the code. Owing to our project team’s expertise in both transaction/payment services and building innovative and reliable platforms for financial organizations, we were able to create a truly unique product and meet all customer’s needs,” commented Denis Ermilov, Cinimex’s Deputy Key Accounts Director.

Source: CNews.