If you’ve been following what FSS has been up to from a product perspective, you would know that we’re betting big on microservices. We believe that microservices architecture, along with cloud, is the future of technology products. Both of which form the foundation of FSS BLAZE^TM.

We launched FSS BLAZE^TM, our cloud-native, microservices-based payment platform, in August 2023 with the vision of enabling banks and financial institutions to avail any service at any time as per their requirement.

Why microservices architecture?

The downsides of monolithic architectures come in the form of high hardware costs, low transaction speeds and cumbersome software changes, to name a few. In such models, all services are typically bundled under just one product. So even if one service is used, the customer needs to integrate and pay for the entire product. This changes under a microservices architecture.

With FSS BLAZE^TM, banks can move faster, experiment with new offerings and explore new markets thanks to its robust, scalable and interconnected architecture. Microservices architecture chops large applications into bite-sized services, each like a mini-app focused on a single task. These services are independent, chat through well-defined APIs and deploy on their own schedules. Think of it as a team of specialists, each mastering their craft and collaborating to build something grand.

This approach brings agility – updates to one service don’t ripple through the whole product. Scaling becomes pinpoint – boost the service handling the most traffic, not the entire behemoth. Plus, innovation thrives as teams can own their service’s destiny, choosing the best tools and languages. To understand more, let’s look at BLAZE’s building blocks.

Building blocks of FSS BLAZE^TM

BLAZE^TM is based on 5 key building blocks. These blocks define the key focus areas for each technology product or service that will be built out on this platform.

• User experience: To make technology simpler, faster and smoother for the customer
• Infrastructure: To make products easy to scale and sustain
• Services: To be able to cover the entire spectrum of payments
• Data and analytics: To be able to visualize, learn and optimize
• Security: To protect businesses and customers from threats and attacks

These building blocks can help banks and financial institutions accelerate the time from design to development. These building blocks also bring several BLAZE^TM benefits for all key stakeholders.

Benefits of FSS BLAZE^TM

As discussed earlier, BLAZE^TM is built on a microservices architecture with modern tools and features that complement the building blocks. The advantages that this brings are manifold.

• Open and secure architecture: To ensure ease of integration, rapid scalability, faster upgrades – all with minimal human intervention in a secure manner
• Rapid experimentation & testing: To innovate faster and achieve the shortest time to market for every piece of technology
• Dynamic ecosystem: To adjust to changing technological environments by being highly compatible and configurable
• Plug-and-Play capability: To provide easy-to-integrate, off-the-shell, fast deployment capabilities
• Vendor/software/tool agnostic: To allow one solution for all payment vendors, channels, tools, databases and systems
• Near-zero downtime: To support ongoing and growing payment loads by being available 24×7 with near-zero system downtime
• Highly secure platform: To be compliant with all data encryption, tokenization, storage, privacy and other global data laws
• Robust data analytics & monitoring insights: To process data in real-time as well as batches for descriptive, diagnostic, prescriptive and predictive analytics
• Agile and flexible: To reduce complexity, promote integration and allow services & systems to change at a faster speed
• Cost-efficient solutions: To ensure business feasibility of the technology for merchants and customers for large scale adoption and success
• Continuous feedback and improvement: To generate quick feedback through rapid development & testing and real-time monitoring and analytics
• Market adaptability: To enable high configurability and adaptability based on business needs, customer preferences and changing technologies

Apart from these benefits, FSS BLAZE^TM also offers real-time processing, multilingual content management and business intelligence dashboard, and more. All of these combined make BLAZE^TM a future-proof solution that is backed by Dev-Sec-Ops practices and one that adheres to global standards and regulations.

Want to learn more? Check out FSS BLAZE^TM here.