Track: Innovations in Fintech

Pony: Actor-Based Language for Low-Latency Streams

Pony is a high-performance, actor based language that compiles to native code. Pony holds great promise for writing *the kinds of* highly concurrent, performance sensitive applications that dominate Fintech. In this talk, I'll discuss my experiences using Pony to build Wallaroo: a high-performance, low-latency stream processing engine. By the end of the talk you'll have learned a little about Pony, what it's like to build a large application with it, and the kinds of problems Pony is great at solving.

Java @Speed: Get the Most out of Modern Hardware

Putting a technology to use in Finserv environments is a great way to find and stretch its limitations, and Java is a great example of that. Behavior artifacts that may be generally interesting across industries often become highlighted as specifically named problems in FinServ. For example, requests to solve to the Java's "Market Open" and "Rare Trading Algo" issues rank among the most requested customer-driven features we've seen. Similarly, the constant drive for speed and leverage of the latest technologies make FinServ environments a great place to demonstrate cutting edge software optimizations and hardware capabilities that then become widely applicable across wide ranging use cases. Discussing some of the optimizations and capabilities that the latest crop of JVMs are able to apply when running on the latest servers is the focus of this talk. We will dive into how such optimizations interplay with warmup, startup, rare executions, and dynamic JIT adaptations. We will also discuss the issues that these techniques can introduce when speed "right out of the gate" or "at rare but critical times" is an important consideration, as if often the case in FinServ applications. We'll even throw in some fun examples of micro-benchmarking pitfalls that often come in the way of understanding what reality looks like in such environments. If you like to geek out to the sound of mechanical sympathy discussions, this is the talk for you.

Dynamically Re-Configurable Event-Driven Systems

To take on new competitors and grab the attention of new generations of clients, traditional financial institutions are faced with the challenge of reinventing their service offering for a digital economy. Our new services must combine modern data types with legacy data, with interaction throughput's an order of magnitude higher. And when existing back-end systems are not architecturally or technologically geared up for these challenges, a new solution approach is needed. In this talk, we cover a modern business agile approach that combines * Event driven business modeling and * Affinity collocation of data and processing to enable financial institutions to design, develop, test, deploy and change services fast in a controlled and non intrusive way.

Functional/Microservices in Real-Time Financials

Financial institutions have the responsibility of providing reliable, correct, and audited financial records for theirs customers and regulators. As financial services move towards real-time and adopt microservices architectures, how can they ensure data quality in a distributed system without compromising availability? We will present how we’ve built our system of record based on functional programming principles, the tools we used (Clojure, Datomic, Kafka), the challenges we faced when taking it to scale, and the benefits of our approach, including data science modeling, real time customer visibility, guaranteed conservation of money, and customer account histories.

Innovations in FinTech Open Space

Digital Assets: 7 Lessons in Securing What's Next

Over the last 8 years the burgeoning space of digital assets including Bitcoin and Ethereum have grown from an idea to a $100+ Billion dollar market that’s increasingly used by people and companies around the world. As this space continues to mature, similarities and differences to existing Fintech applications continue to grow in both directions. This talk recaps on the past several years at the largest cryptocurrency company in the world and explores technical infrastructure and security lessons learned that apply to what’s next in Fintech. Topics include insider threat, red-teaming and moving fast without compromising security.