Welcome to May’s developer blog. Every month, we share the latest updates on what our developers have been working on at Mintos. We delve into improvements, feature developments, and share the innovative solutions powering our platform.
This month, we spoke to one of our engineers, Artis, a full-stack developer who started at Mintos 7 years ago as an intern right out of university. Now he works on the Mintos web app, as well as the internal API and backend tasks.
This month, Artis gave us the inside scoop on kevin, our new and improved deposit system on Mintos.
Research and project criteria
We are constantly updating our platform to make processes more efficient for our investors, which is how this new payment integration project started.
For the first phase of the new project, the team collected customer feedback about what improvements they wanted to see on Mintos. The general theme of the feedback was investors wanted a faster, easier way to add funds to their Mintos account. After feedback was collected and the project was clear, the team conducted market research from many angles: user experience, technical, financial, and legal. Several months went into figuring out which company Mintos was going to be partnering with.
Ultimately, the team decided that kevin was the best option because the system is based on open banking. Open banking is the practice of banks sharing data with licensed third-party service providers. The data is transferred via secure Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which is code that allows two software programs to communicate with each other. Open banking provides greater transparency, security, and lower service fees to account holders.
The most important criteria that the team prioritized for this project was user experience. They wanted the new deposit system to be easy for investors to use. The team’s other considerations included the speed of the payment process, the bank coverage, and finally, the cost – both financial and in the sense of developer resources. Once the project was ready for development, the team got excited. This project was an opportunity to improve money depositing on Mintos which, before this project, had been a slow part of the system for investors.
The integration process
Phase 1: the kevin API
The team started integrating kevin by gathering information regarding data about available banks, the payment flow, and identifying what data needed to be provided, and at what step.
The team identified the information required to communicate with kevin and was then able to integrate its services to operate as a collaborative unit utilizing its APIs. APIs allow the applications to share data, including financial data stored by banks. The financial data is shared with kevin and not Mintos. Kevin acts as the middleman between Mintos and the investor’s bank.
The team then started receiving available banks from kevin, which were held in the database. We store this data in our own database for faster and easier access to this information, instead of asking kevin every time an investor wants to make a deposit
Phase 2: feature toggles
Toggles were added for the new kevin features. A toggle is a switch that is used to turn a part of a system on or off, or to switch between two functions. These switches are usable from a web interface, so anyone with access rights can toggle them. This allows our developers to turn them on when we are ready, or turn them off in case there’s a critical bug in the system. These switches also allowed the developers to constantly deliver new features in small parts. The team also made a toggle to specify investors. This allowed them to test updates with a small group of people to make sure everything worked as intended in production.
Phase 3: finalizing the payment flow
The team used a system to schedule tasks (a cron job) that they programmed to run on the Mintos server to refresh the list of banks after a certain period of time. The team also made an internal API endpoint so the Mintos web app could request information from third-party banks. Endpoints are software that allows prescribed, secure access to the code to perform a task. Each endpoint defines its required information and expected responses, available to developers in an API document. After this was completed, the team programmed the communication back and forth for the payment and payment confirmation. Because there was no user interface yet in the early stages, the team created functional tests to ensure everything worked.
Phase 4: the last steps
The team made changes to the payment importing, or the method of how money comes in, and processing to enable a faster depositing process. Then they added new sections in the internal web system for tracking and auditing kevin–related payments. The last steps were to create changes in the web app and put all the pieces together. They did a lot of testing, fixing, changing, and testing again, until everything was production ready.
“Personally, the most complicated part was the process of sending our users to the kevin platform and then having them return to our platform. Mostly because this flow contains several steps to make sure everything goes right, and we needed to make sure the investor didn’t get lost or find themselves on the wrong screen.”
After kevin
After the launch of kevin, the engineering team discussed both the positive and negative aspects of the process over pizza during the closing meeting. They were excited to see the end result, as it was rewarding to develop a project with many small pieces and to see them all come together.
“I would like to give a shout-out to our product owners. They had many meetings and spent a lot of time coordinating what needs to be done and trying to get answers to various questions related to finance, technical implementation, UX, AML, etc. Also, a shout-out to the finance and AML teams that spent months researching to figure out what company to partner with until we found kevin to be the best option. Additionally, kudos to my engineering team for taking the time to make sure we implemented this feature so that we can keep improving our system and benefiting our investors.”
The engineering team has numerous projects coming up in the future. However, when dealing with money, it takes quite a bit of time to make sure everything is secure, legal, and technically plausible. They are currently taking some time to upgrade their internal systems so that they can work on new projects. “Things are always improving on Mintos and it never gets boring. It’s kinda shocking how much has changed over the past 7 years that I have been working here!” says Artis.
As seen on the graph, the ratio of investors that can start investing on the same day as they verified is significantly higher with kevin.
Overall, the launch of kevin represents a significant development in the world of finance and benefits investors who are looking for a fast, efficient, and secure way to transfer funds.
