INDUSTRY

Financial Services
Fin Tech

PRODUCT

MongoDB Atlas

USE CASE

Lending

CUSTOMER SINCE

2019

INTRODUCTION

Efficient banking made easy

Basikon is a Software as a Service (SaaS) designed by financing experts with cutting-edge technology that revolutionizes the way financial institutions collaborate with their partners and customers to manage any kind of loans, leases, guarantees, and wholesale financing. However, building a front-to-back loan and lease digital system can be challenging for even the most established organizations. Despite this, Basikon, a startup incepted in 2019, has managed to deploy over 15 of these systems in just three years and can now replicate its model to deploy functionalities in a matter of months, not years.

THE CHALLENGE

Utilizing modern technology to avoid human error and improve the customer experience

Challenger banks and fintechs are introducing new products at high speeds which require established players to review their existing lending and leasing systems (and the challenges that come with their legacy architecture that can reach back to the pre-web era in their designs). Many systems, originally designed for never-changing processes, become the static throttle against innovation. Established banks deliver genuine value to customers through time-proven, well-worn processes. However, legacy operations and manual processes stand in the way of creating the speed and flexibility for seamless customer and partner journeys, back-office automation, and continuous innovation.

Modern technology has streamlined processes to create a joint-up lending experience, reducing the latency for financial approvals. Systems that have not automated the process end-to-end are prone to human error, slow approval times, and a disjointed customer experience. Systems not designed for API integration and wokflow automation stand in the way of firms being able to reduce operational risk and achieve greater scalability.

"Once you jump into the world of API-only, NoSQL, 100% digital, microservices, you realize how absurdly complex things were done in the last 30 years."

Thomas Nokin, Founder and CEO at Basikon

THE SOLUTION

Orchestrating and enabling cloud native, configurable, microservice-based software

Basikon's solution to the challenge was born out of the complexity of digitalizing legacy banking systems with a cloud-native SaaS platform built on MongoDB. Basikon, a cloud-native solution that manages the full life cycle for loans and leases, seeks to overcome the dissociated front and back office allowing customers to adapt their business to their clients needs at a minimal cost. With an out-of-the-box front-to- back-end system based on workflow and low-code capabilities, Basikon enables customers to nurture end-to-end experiences through an integrated API ecosystem.

A new era in financing requires cloud native, configurable, microservice-based software that can handle the complete life cycle of any kind of financing. Basikon, as shown in Figure 1 below, is able to orchestrate the digital journeys in both the front and back office, as well as enabling the management of the distribution of financing products directly or through a network of partners with the complete management of the approvals and financial conditions of these partners.

Figure 1: Basikon handling the complete customer life cycle

By orchestrating the entire process, financial institutions are able to accelerate approvals, increase agility, and improve productivity. Core lending systems are often limited to back-office operations (for example, payout and repayments of the installments), and everything else is typically done through email exchange leading to a slow and error-prone process. Today, banks need to create a fully digital end-to-end process that includes omnichannel origination, e-KYC, scoring based on APIs, e-signature, providing a post-sale portal to clients’ 24x7, integration with asset maintenance, insurances and so on. The resulting system is way more complex than it used to be and adds challenges with areas like workflows, security, reporting, and around the clock availability. Basikon solves these issues and more by providing an out of the box solution that can be deployed in weeks. With 100% API capabilities, as shown in figure 2 below, and low-code software, customers are able to deploy products faster, at a lower cost.

Figure 2: Basikon is a 100% API SaaS platform

THE RESULTS

MongoDB provides the core capabilities that Basikon requires

Building a composable and flexible banking system can be daunting, especially when using traditional SQL-relational databases to meet ever-changing customer experiences and create new business models. The complexity of managing a lending and leasing system with thousands of tables can make it difficult to adapt to changing business needs. On top of that, traditional messaging infrastructure like RabbitMQ or Kafka can be unwieldy and introduce potential points of failure. Additionally, object relational mapping (ORM) tools can be complex, adding layers of abstraction that are difficult to manage and maintain.

Since inception, Basikon selected MongoDB over other platforms because of its support and flexibility. The founders knew that the banking landscape would be changing constantly and with MongoDB’s more flexible document data model, Basikon are able to simplify the codebase and reduce the need for additional messaging infrastructure by leveraging MongoDB’s event-driven architecture features. This helps streamline the development process, making it easier to quickly and efficiently deploy new versions of the system.

“MongoDB’s flexible document model was the perfect choice for current demands, as well as allowing us to scale and grow in the future”, says Thomas Nokin, Founder and CEO at Basikon.

Basikon have been utilizing MongoDB Atlas, the database-as-a-service (DBaaS) which has proven to be an incredible accelerator. MongoDB Atlas offers a simple, user-friendly platform that allows Basikon to create new environments in seconds, with production-grade features such as backups and replication, providing unprecedented stability. While using a DbaaS model can introduce latency, MongoDB's NoSQL structure allows for the retrieval of complex objects/documents in a single call, unlike SQL databases where data is often spread across many tables, resulting in more query calls and slower performance. This not only eliminates the need for a complex data definition language (DDL) that can slow down the deployment of new versions, but also allows for a more simplified data model.

Basikon also leverages MongoDB's aggregation pipeline as shown in figure 3 below, which enables powerful and fast queries for reporting and dashboarding. Overall, MongoDB's flexibility, simplicity, and robustness help streamline the development process, making it easier and more efficient to deploy new versions of the banking system quickly and effectively.

“With MongoDB, there is no need for a data definition language that complexifies and slows down deployment of new versions..”

Tri Poirier, CTO at Basikon

Figure 3: Basikon leveraging MongoDB Atlas

MongoDB Atlas provides the core capabilities that Basikon requires to dynamically scale their lending and leasing platform, including the flexibility of the document model, continuous backups, easy migrations, aggregations and Atlas Search.

“MongoDB Atlas is very stable – in 4 years, we did not experience a single interruption of service or find a single bug. Upgrades are done in seconds with just the press of a button, increasing our agility 10x. At Basikon, MongoDB has played a crucial role in our success and we wouldn't be where we are today without it.”