It is expected that, by the end of 2025, the global fintech market will grow to $125 billion. But the development and maintenance of a good app comes with challenges. What technologies should you choose? How much will it cost to maintain? And crucially, what hardware should a fintech project choose?
For the growing needs of high-capacity financial calculations, there’s almost no alternative to dedicated servers. Add to that the speed, flexibility and affordability of the as-a-Service format, and you’ll get a high-quality solution for all the infrastructural needs of your business: a public cloud with bare metal servers.
What is a bare metal server?
A bare metal server is a physical server rented by the client. The hardware is available as is – the user gets a clean system, with no pre-installed OS, and is in full control.
If you’re the sole lessee of a server, you have full control over all its resources. You can install anything on it and set it up any way you want, like your own desktop. You want to deploy your own virtual machines? Feel free to do that. You want to use the entire node for a single project? No problem.
Why is bare metal a good fit for fintech?
Dedicated servers are a better fit for resource-heavy apps. In the world of financial services, there’s a lot of transactions going on. Virtual machines are not the best choice for such an environment, since the “virtualisation tax” prevents you from using 100% of their capacity. Another issue is the distribution of the platform’s resources between users – when one of them uses too much of the server’s capacity, their neighbours pay for it.
Unlike virtual machines, dedicated nodes are better at coping with resource-heavy tasks. According to research, when performing tasks that require high processing speed, virtual machines lose up to 17% of capacity compared to bare metal servers. This is because bare metal users have full access to the server and can single-handedly use all its computational resources. This approach allows the organisation of a more productive platform to receive, process and store financial app data.
Why the Bare-Metal-as-a-Service model?
Bare metal solutions are often harder to order than a virtual machine, and you must wait longer for the server to be prepared for operation. Another issue is the management of the disparate infrastructure of dedicated servers, virtual machines and clouds when purchased from different providers.
G-Core Labs’ new offering, Bare-Metal-as-a-Service, solves these problems. With this service, a user can get a ready-for-use dedicated server as easily as a virtual one. Just select the right features, connect a private or public network, or several networks at once, and in a few minutes, the physical server will be ready for use.
Extra security is expected from fintech
To provide financial services on the EU and US markets, you need to be 100% confident that your app works securely and your infrastructure is reliable. If the PCI DSS standard is not met, a company may have to pay hefty fines.
That can be avoided by choosing a reliable provider. For example, with G-Core Labs, you can be confident about the high level of protection of the cardholder’s personal information in the cloud, which is particularly important for the financial sector and for any companies that work with acquiring. The G-Core Labs cloud has been certified under the PCI DSS 3.2.1 standard for storage, processing and transfer of payment card data. The certification has been confirmed after the yearly QSA audit run by the company Compliance Control Ltd.
To ensure even better data security, G-Core Labs dedicated server users can use the encryption technology Intel SGX, a set of processor instructions that an app can use to allocate private parts of code or data, ensuring extra protection from disclosure or modification.
Fintech app developers need full access to hardware
When working with high loads, you need maximum capacity, so it is crucial to be able to choose and set up all hardware components on your own.
For example, digital insurance creates a significant increase in policy administration speed and processing of hundreds of kinds of claims. Such apps help reduce the likelihood of insurance fraud. They can be anything from a simple website offering an insurance policy for a car rental to a complex CRM system, for which even the most powerful stock servers might not be enough.
In the G-Core Labs Bare-Metal-as-a-Service public cloud, all these tasks – configuration management, orchestration and the addition of new dedicated servers – can be automated through API to quickly scale the platform in accordance with the client’s resource needs. The data can be also stored on NVMe drives. Servers located in G-Core Labs data processing centres offer capacity and control so full as though they were located right in your office.
Latency should be minimal
Modern fintech apps need the servers to be as failure-proof and high-capacity as possible. Imagine you’re launching an instant loan service for small businesses. The first thing you need to ensure is efficient processing of credit requests and interaction between borrowers and loaners. The essence of this concept is very quick data processing, instant decision making and split-second responses.
Such solutions require high-bandwidth infrastructure. G-Core Labs has dedicated servers that provide this, located in reliable data Tier III and IV data servers in over 15 cities of the world.
Fintech apps need quick database access
Fintech apps, especially those with real-time bidding (RTB), often need quick access to user profiles and information about their access. Disintermediation is fintech’s most powerful weapon, but it has a lot of requirements.
For example, digital investment platforms allow beginner and pro investors to explore and use different financial assets. These solutions allow the users to get analytics data, which, in turn, allows them to increase the efficiency of their investments. The servers of such apps manage millions of operations simultaneously.
In the G-Core Labs cloud, you can use high-capacity NVM disks, and the processing power is ensured by Intel. In April 2021, the provider was one of the first in the world to start integrating 3rd gen Intel Xeon Scalable (Ice Lake) processors in the server infrastructure of its cloud services. This equipment allows fintech apps to quickly manage any tasks.
Cloud services pretty much emulate a local data-processing centre, with its high and predictable capacity. They are the perfect fit for the resource-heaviest tasks. Therefore, bare metal is the most useful for tasks like real-time transaction processing or analytics systems, without which a fintech app cannot be imagined. Bare-Metal-as-a-Service is the most realistic alternative to a private server for a fintech startup.
Discover more about Bare-Metal-as-a-Service with G-Core Labs
