Unravelling the Vision of FSS BLAZE from a Tech Lens

At FSS, we pride ourselves in being a customer-centric and customer-first organization. The culture of our organization is built around the ethos of moving fast and experimenting with new offerings, markets & capabilities. 

At the same time, we want to leverage on the vast knowledge, gathered over multiple decades, while dealing with a lot of legacy systems that have trapped lots of data and capabilities in certain functions. FSS BLAZE^TM is conceptualized and designed with domain driven technology components having distinguished capabilities that play well together. 

The products powered by FSS BLAZE^TM will be cloud ready and cloud agnostic, which will ensure a cost-efficient payments solution ecosystem. FSS BLAZE^TM promotes experimentation with flexible architecture for co-innovation and partnership with both financial and technology entities.

The mission and vision behind FSS BLAZE^TM

The mission of FSS BLAZE^TM is to provide our company the technical capability to build world class products and service repositories that are reliable, scalable and maintainable, with focus towards low cost of ownership and transaction. The vision is to transform business through:

• Use of technology and automation to provide low-friction user experience and low touch application processing
• Ability to innovate and launch products with shortest time to the market
• Build open and secure architecture that scales massively without major human intervention
• Provide the platform capability, so that entire organization can rapidly experiment new ideas and convert them into viable products for the market
• Provide with capabilities for the organization to build data platforms that enable data driven decision making, better pattern recognition and better observability of systems and applications running at any given time
• Build the core libraries and service sets that will be the foundational building blocks of any service sets and products that we endeavour to build in the next 3 to 5 years
• Build the common domain services that will be required by the individual product lines to create true business services
• Build a platform ecosystem that comprises of multiple services, libraries and building blocks, broadly grouped into focus areas like Services, Infrastructure, Data, Security, Experience etc

Understanding the platform ecosystem

We acknowledge that a platform has a whole should be treated as a group of many products/services that blend to address multiple capabilities, where they can be self-sufficient or can be dependent (loosely coupled) on outcomes from other products/services. We are thus treating the platform as a product, with internal ‘customers’ of its own. This will hide complexity, remove friction and, the respective teams will thrive to improve on the concerned capabilities that will be better than whatever was implemented previously. 

Every team is running as a product team. While the product might be technology, they are looking to understand the internal customer’s goals and figure out how to make them successful. Along with working for customer satisfaction with every release, we are bringing it to every level of the organization. The infrastructure engineers should care about how easy it is for their customers (internal team managing a service) to check the health of the systems, auto deployment, performance concerns or the security validations. That passion for serving the internal customer at every level along with the external customers’ satisfaction is the essential ingredient and the platform philosophy to how platforms evolve and scale.

As an internal product, the platform will ultimately improve the capabilities of the business, as opposed to technology that is designed to solve specific, pre-existing problems. In this sense the platform is making positive contributions rather than keeping the lights on in managing old known stuffs repeatedly.

The anatomy of a business service

• A dynamic configuration of controls and libraries that intend to create value with other services through co-creation
• A formal specification of agreed expectations, rights, obligations, and interfaces of two or more services
• Seamless updates and release as the business logic and tech capabilities are managed independently
• Regulatory requirements and mandates, addressing compliances can be well managed

Performance driven purpose-built engines

• A well-integrated collection of services, working together to address a larger functional requirement
• Generic engines for multiple products, usable, extendable, and compatible with all products.
• Pluggable with capability to extend and integrate with minimal changes through configuration
• Efficiency and performance optimized, ensuring the best of technology to meet business goals
• Designed and developed for handling scalability for the future needs with cost effective and optimized resource utilization

The building blocks of FSS BLAZE^TM

These ‘blocks’ represent separate capabilities, with steps taken to enhance efficiency and reduce complexity so that they can be used more effectively by engineers and the business to build, deliver, and measure customer experiences. The team responsible for these ‘blocks’ are focused towards enhancing the functional capabilities of the business concern at hand to improve and innovate, rather than spending time to address the process or the technicalities around them. These ‘blocks’ thus becomes great opportunities to accelerate time to market, in-built security and enable re-usability across products.

For FSS BLAZE^TM to become a platform ecosystem, we intend to promote multiple such building blocks, broadly grouped into focus areas like Services, Infrastructure, Data, Security, Experience, which in turn help accelerate the time to convert concept to cash, either with experimentation or data analytics or getting consumer insights.

The platform advantage

FSS BLAZE^TM ensures and guarantees to address the industry concerns with respect to the products meeting the non-functional requirements along with the functional requirements. Business functions and services in the first place are focused on Payment Gateway, Merchant Management System, Real-Time Payments, and Card Management System. The non-functional requirements (NFRs) that emphasize FSS BLAZE^TM are:

Architecture

The software uses a microservices architecture for flexibility and resilience. It's cloud-native for efficiency and cost savings. The cloud-agnostic approach ensures flexibility across cloud platforms. FSS BLAZE^TME was enriched with generic platform components (State Machine, Rule Engine, Validation and Logger libraries, API, and UI Generative SDKs, Go Connect) which are the backbone of various business services. 

Scalability

Scalability involves horizontal and vertical scaling for efficient workload management. Horizontal scaling handles instances independently, while vertical scaling boosts a single machine's capacity. On-demand traffic management and cloudburst strategies prevent slowdowns during traffic spikes. It reduces capex by paying for computing capacity as needed.

Availability

FSS BLAZE^TM provides high availability clusters for uninterrupted service and reliability, along with hybrid multi-region cloud and on-premises infrastructure for scalability and redundancy. Plus it comes with efficient rolling software updates and chaos monkey tests to minimize disruptions and improve resilience.

Durability

Durability in microservices architecture ensures application availability despite component failures, including data archival for future use and honouring transactions in transit. Combined with fault tolerance, the system remains operational even when components fail.

Performance

Performance includes focused functionality for improved maintainability and enhanced security. Software services are resource-efficient with optimized resource utilization. Containerization and benchmarking in every release ensure functionality meets expectations.

Agility

Service development with maintainable, testable, and deployable code ensures software portability across platforms, making it easier to deploy, maintain, and improve longevity. Additionally, configurable services with well-defined APIs are compatible with various applications.

Usability

Usability principles like Clarity, Consistency, Efficiency, and Affordance guide our UX design. We offer multi-lingual support and localization for diverse customer needs. Learnability is enhanced with user manuals and FAQs featuring clear, concise, step-by-step instructions.

Extensibility

Extensibility emphasizes adaptability to requirements & feedback. It involves modular design - Domain-Oriented Microservice Architecture (DOMA), allowing easy integration of new services/components and proactive extension points for future features and mandates implementation.

Resiliency

Resiliency strategies include graceful recovery, gradual deployment, and fault tolerance. Graceful recovery helps systems bounce back from failures, gradual deployment ensures smooth transitions and fault tolerance builds resilient systems with circuit breakers.

Consistency

Consistency is achieved through a comprehensive approach that includes a visual and functional design system, utilizing Domain-driven design (DDD) and DOMA for functional consistency across services and features. Additionally, omni-channel capability ensures a uniform user experience across various devices, while maintaining data consistency throughout all operations and transactions.

Compliance

Compliance updates, regional and global mandates, and system libraries are validated in every build. Payment Card Industry Secure Software Standard (PCI S3), Europay, MasterCard, and Visa (EMV CO), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and RBI mandates will have planned execution and release cycles which will ensure timely updates and patches.

Security

Security by design, achieved through DEV-SEC-OPS practices, includes NextGen Firewalls for advanced application-level threat protection and API security via Security Testing Mechanisms (SAST, DAST, SCA, IAST, RASP, VA, PT) to assess source code and detect vulnerabilities. Data security is ensured through encryption, tokenization, and compliance with global data laws, covering 'Data at Rest' and 'Data in Motion' for comprehensive system security.

Observability

Developed customizable dashboards with rich visuals for end-user persona support in real-time and batch mode. High visibility across all systems with dynamic, automated reports using open telemetry for monitoring. Centralized logging system for data analysis, audit, and ML/AI-backed insights in descriptive, diagnostic, prescriptive, and predictive analytics.

Visit our webpage to learn more about FSS BLAZE^TM.