Financial Infrastructure

The back end of the backend.

What is FinFra? (The back end of the backend).

I would be lying if I said that I knew what the term Finfra meant when I originally applied for the job at Holvi. My best guess was that it had to be related to “France”, hence the second part (Fra). However, I didn’t pay much attention to the name of the team. The job advertisement listed both “Django” and “Python” — I love both.

Now, after couple of months atHolvi, I am more comfortable explaining the term and the team named after it (FinFra team). The journey of the term discovery and how to explain it to people was a bit hard. Unfortunately, trying to explain “FinFra” to people inside and outside Holvi hasn’t always come to fruition.

So, FinFra?

“The back end of the backend” would be the tagline I would choose for the team. The FinFra team is responsible for all the cogs and gears when it comes to the banking side of Holvi. As you know, the modern monetary system is consisted of complicated relations between banks.

Holvi is a payment servicer, and we support two types of payments:

1. Direct payment: Lets you pay directly to another bank account using account IBAN. Holvi is part of SEPA network in Europe. An example for this is when you pay your rent to your landlord.

2. Card payments: Let’s you pay using your credit card. Holvi is part of the MasterCard scheme.

These services differ from other backend services in a way that the user expects it to work precisely every time. FinFra capabilities enable Holvi users to use Holvi MasterCards, as well as making payments from their own accounts. In Holvi, we add a bit of responsibility to FinFra in that we offer KYC (Know Your Customer) services as well. The definition of KYC is: A process to filter the users coming into your service with a set of legal and security related conditions. In Holvi, we have a twist addition to the definition by defining KYC as “the art of letting only good people into your services without annoying them with routine and boring procedures”.

FinFra team members are either working in development or operations. Operations are the people who improvise and apply the business logic in FinFra. Operations also connects Holvi with other banks and services, and they handle the hardest and toughest of problems that cannot be solved with normal coding. The other half of the FinFra team are we, the developers. The developers are responsible for providing new capabilities and maintaining and improving the capabilities we already have. Challenges facing the developers will require a separate detailed article. But in short, we — the developers — maintain the link between Holvi and vendors. Developers also maintain the foundation (the infrastructure) on which the other backend developers in Holvi use to build services for Holvi users. The challenges facing FinFra developers is an exciting subject on its own, I will do my best to address this separately in a later article.

Holvi FinFra is an amazing team to work with—we have an amazing team dynamically and structurally. Mostly, we are faced with more problems to solve rather than duties to fulfil. Problem solving as a job is a blessing. If you want to join us, we are always welcoming new FinFra members: check our open positions here.