The embedded finance platform you pick to power your financial products defines your customers' experience. To protect customer trust, build quality UX, maintain strong security, and support program scalability, you need to pick the right platform. So, what do you look for? 

There's a term that acts as an umbrella of excellence, defining a great embedded finance platform — "enterprise-grade." We'll unpack what that means, why it's important, and why Bond invests so heavily in maintaining enterprise-grade excellence.

What makes an enterprise-grade embedded finance platform?

In short, an enterprise-grade platform is available, interoperable, observable, reliable, and secure.

Let’s take a look at each attribute one by one. 

Availability

Availability measures the percentage of time that the Bond platform is capable of handling requests from our customers and partners. What we strive for is 4 nines: 99.99% uptime.

As a cloud-native platform, it's imperative that we implement mechanisms to keep Bond available and able to process requests. Our platform uses an active-active deployment strategy; we have multiple production environments running alongside one another with requests being load balanced between them. Should one of our environments go down due to a third-party issue or an unexpected network outage, the other environments will continue to process requests seamlessly. Switching between environments is dynamic and transparent, ensuring that there is no service interruption. 

Building, maintaining, and operating an active-active deployment is technically an investment in availability but truly an investment in customer trust. 

Interoperability 

No business is an island — it takes a host of third-party databases, developer platforms, APIs, CRM software, and other tools to run your company. An embedded finance platform should be able to integrate and operate in that ecosystem easily.

Bond's platform is built for developers; our intuitive APIs, flexible SDKs, concise documentation and sandbox environments give your developers all the tools they need to build beautiful and impactful products. Sign up here to start building your product against our sandbox!

Observability

We've discussed a few critical factors that comprise enterprise-grade but how do you measure them? That's where observability comes in. 

Observability means measuring and sharing the data that define the health of Bond's platform. While we have a customer-facing status page to share how Bond is operating, we actively monitor the four golden signals — latency, traffic, errors and saturation of every component on our platform — to continually improve the performance and availability of Bond.

We believe in transparency and provide insight into the internal operations of our platform so that you can confidently serve your customers.‍

Reliability

‍Imagine that a company — lets call them Acme Inc. — launches a customer loyalty credit card and digital app powered by Bond. Once that product is in customer's hands, both company and customer alike want to make sure the experience is consistent.

To protect the confidence that Acme Inc.'s customers have in the company, Bond invests heavily in building a reliable technology platform to protect and cultivate customer trust.

Bond handles partner-related failures as a first-class citizen by using Apache Kafka to provide a durable, idempotent and asynchronous communication backbone for partner integrations. This allows Bond to absorb upstream partner failures while providing a consistent and responsive API while maintaining transactional integrity for our customers. 

In the modern age of cloud computing, failures are bound to happen but Bond’s goal is to ensure that the embedded finance products that drive your product innovation are not subject to these failures. This is why our platform is built from the ground-up with a hardened resilience to failure. ‍

Security

As a multi-bank, multi-partner and multi-tenant platform, Bond needs to take extra care when handling customer requests whether those requests originate from inbound API calls or via batch files. The governance around data access is paramount.

Privacy and security is at the heart of Bond’s DNA and we have designed our PCI compliant, SOC2 certified platform with the Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) at its core. This is a much larger topic that we will cover in the future, but we believe that the only way to truly protect your customer’s data is to explicitly authenticate and authorize requests for data without relying on implicit trust perimeters. 

When it comes to handling sensitive data, we do not store, encrypt, or handle PCI data on our platform at all; we tokenize and secure that data in a PCI-compliant data vault. Other sensitive information, including all Personally-Identifiable Information (PII), is encrypted both in transit and at rest.‍

Choosing the right embedded finance partner

‍Keeping these critical factors in mind is very important for you and your customers when you’re searching for an embedded finance partner. At Bond, availability, interoperability, observability, reliability and security are always at the forefront.

Bond is truly a partner that works alongside our customers to help bring financial products to life. We're here to help unpack the complexities of financial regulation, draw you a clear roadmap to success, or demonstrate how to use our platform to manage critical operations like KYC or KYB. 

We would love to chat so we can understand how you see your company using Bond and learn what enterprise-grade means to you! 

Reach out to jaco@bond.tech directly or contact us and let’s chat!