Banking Without Banks? Building Resilient Wallet Infrastructure in Unstable Times
Date:
Surviving API Chaos: How Fintechs Pivoted Fast After Providus Shutdown
In January 2021, Providus Bank announced they were shutting down their virtual account service. This sent many fintechs — including PiggyVest, RiseVest, and others — into a frenzy.
Engineering and business teams suddenly had to:
- Find new virtual account providers
- Build new integration rails
- Connect those rails to their systems
- Test the entire payment flow
- Make everything production-ready in record time
How Were They Able to Do It?
In this talk, I will walk through how it’s possible using a dummy fintech app called Akeke.
I will explain the best-practice microservice architecture that makes it easy to:
- Turn off any external API
- Plug in a new one
- Go live in hours, not weeks
Key Takeaways
This talk breaks down how the right architecture decisions empowered fintechs to pivot under pressure:
- ✅ Microservices for isolated, independently deployable services
- ✅ Abstraction layers to decouple internal logic from external APIs
- ✅ Event queues to handle asynchronous flows and retries
- ✅ Modular APIs for plug-and-play integration
The right architecture doesn’t just scale — it saves you when everything breaks.