Moniepoint hosts fintech engineers on infrastructure resilience

Moniepoint has brought together senior engineering practitioners from Nigeria’s fintech ecosystem to discuss the challenges of building and operating financial technology infrastructure at scale.

The inaugural Moniepoint Off the Record Engineering Mixer was held in Lagos recently to create a platform for technical leaders to exchange experiences on scaling fintech systems.

The event brought together senior engineers from fintech companies, including Flutterwave, Cowrywise and Nomba, for discussions on distributed systems and payment infrastructure.

The sessions focused on “Building for Scale, The Trade-offs of Distributed Systems in Fintech” and “Building Distributed Systems for POS at Scale”, with participants examining system failures, network dependencies, architectural trade-offs, observability, security and designing systems to withstand failures.

Speaking on the engineering approach, Engineering Manager, Card Payments, Moniepoint, Ayomide Kolawole, said reliable payment infrastructure required engineers to understand the points at which transactions could fail and determine the appropriate response at each stage.

“Building reliable payment infrastructure is about understanding every point at which a transaction can fail, determining what the system knows at each stage and designing the right response when things go wrong,” he said.

Moniepoint said the discussions were based on the view that the challenges associated with building fintech infrastructure at scale were shared across the industry and could benefit from greater technical collaboration among practitioners.

The company also highlighted its approach to building resilient card payment systems, particularly its efforts to protect customers from false debits when transaction outcomes are uncertain.

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Kolawole added that the objective was to ensure that customers did not bear the consequences of failures occurring within payment systems.

“For us, the goal is not simply to process transactions quickly, but to make sure that when something goes wrong, the customer experience does not become the cost of that failure,” he said.

The company said its card payments infrastructure processes tens of millions of transactions daily and uses mechanisms designed to respond differently depending on the certainty of a transaction’s outcome.

It said transactions that were sufficiently unlikely to succeed could be failed quickly, while cases where the outcome remained uncertain were subjected to further checks before a definitive response was presented to the customer.

Moniepoint said its infrastructure also monitors the health of individual issuing banks across processors, tracking success rates and response times in real time.

According to the company, when a destination crosses a configured threshold, the system automatically stops routing transactions there to reduce delays and the risk of transactions accumulating within the system.

The engineering discussions also examined architectural approaches, including sharding, asynchronous processing and service decomposition, with participants considering the operational and maintenance trade-offs that can emerge from such decisions.

Moniepoint said the discussions further highlighted the importance of observability and security in understanding system behaviour, identifying emerging risks and strengthening the resilience of financial technology infrastructure.