Running a Fintech with Ruby
Aitor Garcia Rey
Aitor García Rey is a founder, staff engineer and fractional CTO. He has been shipping software used by small companies, VC-backed startups and big publicly traded multinationals uninterruptedly for more than 20 years, leading and mentoring highly technical teams.
During the last few years, he has been working extensively with instant payments in the SEPA area, enabling the process of dozens of thousands of transactions and millions of euros per month. After a decade of living in Iceland, Aitor moved back with his family to his hometown in the Basque Country, where his passion for gastronomy can be more easily enjoyed.
About
Devengo is a European fintech providing instant transfers and A2A (Account to Account) banking infrastructure across the SEPA space.
For the last four years, we have been using Ruby/Rails as the core of our tech stack, and it has taken us through a global pandemic, a few funding rounds and even a pivot. As CTO, I've been lucky to have a first-row seat in this journey and would love to share what we have learned about the industry and using Ruby on it.
Ruby and almost indissolubly Rails have had for a very long time the reputation of being a slow, too-unpredictable language and, as a consequence, frown upon industries that prime performance and security. Although some of the heaviest hitters in the world of transacting money -Stripe, Shopify- depend on Ruby, we still get sceptical looks from time to time when we describe our stack.
However, in our daily practice, we have not only not found the language a source of problems but have come to appreciate it as a source of joy, especially the devs that have come in contact with Ruby for the first time when incorporated in Devengo. Nonetheless, there are some tough challenges to overcome when building a scalable service in one of the most tightly regulated and demanding spaces – Finance.