Fin(technology) Marketing

What customers need for theirs.

In the world of fintech there is one clear requirement and that is efficiency. Never has it been more relevant in the world of fintech to spend your time wisely. Yes, money plays a big part of that, but time is by far the more valuable commodity. Financial institutions need to be first, fast, effective and relevant. So then where does technology help with that?

The answer is simple, without technology your will lose a lot of time, this will lead to the loss of clients and will inevitably cost you money. So, you see this is the chain of events.

Time, Clients, Money. Time is the technology part of this chain and its important to use that correctly to make it very effective. You need to use technology to be effective for your customers.

In the fintech space specifically where client facing marketing sites are required there is a standardized need for the use of WordPress. Yes WordPress, and yes, I know it’s not what you would consider a superior platform for large scale financial institutions, but yes, it is the requirement. Why, well its easy to deploy, and easy to maintain from a content perspective, but this ease of use comes at a cost. Security and performance. WordPress sites are known for their performance problems and this is even more amplified when using WordPress plugins and this makes security the biggest problem.

So, what do we do in order to get the security and performance aspects of WordPress resolved?

To tackle this problem, we had to look at automating our entire process which included the deployment of a WordPress environment with an attached database at the click of a button. For that we looked at two areas of interest Cloud infrastructure like Google or AWS and DNS platforms like CloudFlare.

But we are not going to look at the cloud infrastructure first, what we are instead going to look at is how we save time by making use of DNS platform API’s.

Previously our infrastructure was based on a custom build servers, this made it incredibly difficult for us to effectively build a solution that would deploy customer solutions within a very short period.

What we ended up with was an infrastructure leveraging off of cloud services like elastic container search and connecting that to a our DNS manager that allowed us to cache sites as well as leverage of the security on how sites are accessed, which regions have access to those sites and the quantity of those requests to prevent any sort of damaging attacks like DDoS.

What we ended up with was a solution that allowed financial institutions to deploy WordPress sites within a matter of seconds this included the scaffolding of a basic WordPress implementation with a set of must use plugins, strict levels of caching integrated into how static media is cached when uploaded and how that cache is cleared when content is changed as well as firewall security that prevented access to people maliciously attacking WordPress sites.

The end result of that was a tool that was built to allow customers and agencies to deploy and design and create WordPress sites that was still restricted to prevent custom plugins to be added but still leveraged enough freedom for customers to create the experiences they wanted. Because of the set number of plugins that was used within the WordPress site we also had full control on the security and the integrity of the content loaded onto the site this gave customers the ability to deploy WordPress sites quickly and efficiently as well as integrated into the financial tools offered by the company to get first to market in the shortest period of time possible .