The Blueprint for Paytech Systems By Suresh Vaghjiani (@Sir_Resh) The real success of the widely labelled fintech sector has been that the customer is at the centre of the solution. Incumbents have always looked at the technology first to see how it can service the end user rather than the other way round. However, what we have seen so far has been innovation on the front end whereas the technology of the service providers that are behind the scenes remain the same. You could argue that this is the perfect scalable solution but fundamentally the incumbent technology was never made to service the insatiable demand of these customer centric paytech companies. In the last few years we started to see banking technology platforms that were 30yrs old becoming’ end of life’. The truth is that technology is moving so fast that those thirty year circles have now been reduced to ten years or less. As cloud technology seems to be silver bullet what is often misunderstood is that even if you are managing your entire technology stack in the cloud, this is still ultimately held on some physical servers elsewhere. Contrary to popular belief, your technology can still fail when using the cloud services. Just like there is no magic fat loss pill, this is also the case with technology. Technology can fail; but if the architecture of the platform mitigates the risk the impacts are minimal. The blue print for change in this paytech space is that new platforms and service providers need to build their system in a modular framework, meaning that if something goes wrong or a release goes wrong, it only impacts the specific module and would not bring the entirely of the service down as we have seen of recent. New platforms should be built as if you were building something from lego, they are all inter-connected but if something goes wrong it should only impact one independent block.