Cinimex has developed a microservice platform for VTB to process financial transactions

2023: Tadviser IT Prize 2023 in the nomination "Digitalization in banks: project of the year"

VTB Bank's financial transaction processing platform (POFT) for the development of interbank settlements and payment services won the TADVISER IT PRIZE 2023 in the Digitalization in Banks: Project of the Year nomination. The platform was developed and implemented by VTB together with Cinimex on the basis of a stack of open source technologies . POFT maintains international standards for the transmission of financial information, while not using foreign solutions in this area.

POFT ensures the exchange of electronic messages within payment system VTB, as well as the exchange with partner payment systems banks both through public financial message transmission systems and through direct interbank interaction channels. The presence of such a platform allows you to quickly connect new channels of financial messaging, expand the geography of the VTB payment system and ultimately improve the service and create unique products for the bank's customers. Read more here.

2022: Implementation of Financial Transaction Processing Platform

In 2022, Cinimex, together with the VTB team, developed and implemented a financial transaction processing platform (POFT) based on a fully open source technology stack. Cinimex announced this on June 1, 2023.

POFT ensures the exchange of electronic messages payment system within VTB, as well as the exchange with the payment systems of banks partners both through public financial message transmission systems and through direct interbank interaction channels.

The presence of such a platform allows you to quickly connect new channels of financial messaging, expand the geography of VTB's payment system, provide service bureau services and ultimately improve the service and create unique products for bank customers.

POFT maintains international standards for the transmission of financial information, while not using import solutions in this area.

Previously, services in the field of interbank settlements were provided through systems based on software from leading foreign vendors (IBM and Oracle) and were implemented on an outdated "monolithic" software architecture.

In 2022, VTB Bank was faced with the task of making a universal reliable, import-independent platform for ensuring information exchange between banks, legal entities, payment systems and building an architecture that allows you to add various types and routes of financial transactions by analogy with the designer, without changing the main components of the POFT system.

The solution was the transition from a "monolithic" to a microservice architecture based on an import-independent technology stack with deployment in VTB's private cloud. This architecture provides a high level of reliability and fault tolerance, provides significant platform scaling potential.

In addition to changing the software architecture, the microservice architecture made it possible to change the approach to forming commands when creating new services and significantly increase the speed of changes. The technological stack allows you to quickly assemble small teams - no more than 10-12 experts to implement a service with a completely autonomous set of functionality that solves the problem in the field of providing payment services and services, and uses ready-made technical platform services.

As a result, we received a tool for the development of interbank settlements and payment services, working on common open-source solutions and hardware, deployed on the standard server infrastructure of the VTB private cloud. The reliability of the solution is ensured by multiple redundancy both at the cloud level and at the PEFT level. Due to the use of engineering practices, the quality of releases has significantly increased, the time-to-market of the withdrawal of new services has decreased, "said Oleg Boltar, Deputy Head of the Settlement Automation Department of VTB Bank.

Within the framework of the project, a large analysis of both solutions based on open-source platforms and platforms of large Russian vendors was carried out, and the most popular and actively developing frameworks were selected. The main idea is to create not only a reliable platform, but also a product for the development of which it is easy to find programmers and make the work attractive and interesting. Therefore, a modern technology stack was chosen, which is used by technology companies around the world.

The POFT microservice platform is built on a classic technology stack: Java Spring Boot, Kubernetes containerization, platform scaling through Apache Kafka, Prometheus and Grafana monitoring are used as a framework for microservice development, log collection and analysis are organized on the basis of the EFK stack - combinations of Elastic Search, Fluentd and Kibana, distributed cache - Tarantool.

The system is already operating in industrial operation and allows bank customers to use new services. Thanks to containerization and microservice architecture, POFT has the ability to scale and increase the number of payments without changing the system code. Thanks to the business expertise of our project team, both in transactional and payment services, and in building innovative and reliable platforms for financial institutions, we managed to make a truly special product and achieve all the customer's goals, - said Denis Ermilov, Deputy Director for Key Clients at Cinimex.