Ploutos - An OpenBanking Application
Accessing financing remains a significant challenge for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), often hindered by traditional credit assessments and bureaucratic hurdles. Ploutos emerges as a groundbreaking OpenBanking platform, tailored to revolutionize SME financing by leveraging real-time financial data. By providing alternative lending solutions, FinSME enables lenders to assess an SME’s financial health with greater accuracy and efficiency, facilitating quicker and more informed lending decisions. The platform ensures a seamless and transparent financing process, empowering SMEs to thrive and grow without the constraints of conventional financing methods.
Within the short development period given, the MVP will focus on providing a secure and user-friendly application for SMEs to connect their financial accounts and receive a preliminary credit assessment. This streamlined approach will demonstrate the platform’s potential to simplify financing processes for SMEs.
Name: Ibrahim Cetinkaya Student number: 48536248
The MVP will offer a simplified workflow for SMEs:
Signup -> Verification -> Start using the application
Login -> Connect financial account -> View basic financial summary (The financial accounts will be random sandbox accounts from banking API’s)
Review Financial Account Summary -> Review summary
Request preliminary credit assessment -> Review results
Simulate loan application -> Generate report
The MVP scope for FinSME will include the following core features:
User Login: Create a simple web application for user login and account management.
Financial Account Integration: Allow users to connect a single bank account using a mock OpenBanking API.
Preliminary Credit Assessment: Provide a basic credit assessment based on fetched financial data.
Financial Summary: Display a basic summary of the user’s financial data, including transaction history and balance trends.
Loan Application Simulation: Allow users to simulate a loan application process, inputting desired loan amount and purpose.
Report Generation: Generate a simple report summarizing the financial summary and preliminary credit assessment, which can be downloaded as a PDF.
Reliability: The platform must reliably retrieve data from banking APIs without errors or interruptions. Consistent and accurate data fetching is crucial for the credibility of your platform’s financial assessments.
Scalability: Ensure the system can handle a high number of concurrent users, with a focus on optimizing performance for the MVP. Also as the number of API calls increases, the platform must be able to scale to handle the growing load without degradation in performance.
Modularity/Extensibility: The system will be designed with future extensibility in mind, allowing for easy addition of features post-MVP. For example OpenBanking API’s are constantly adding new features like payment API’s and the Consumer Data Right will be opening up to sectors like Energy and Telecommunication, which could all play a role in our application.
Scalability:
Test Method: Conduct load testing using tools like JMeter or Locust to simulate increasing levels of concurrent users accessing the platform and making API calls to banking platforms. Metrics: Measure the system’s response time, throughput, and error rate as the load increases. Determine the maximum number of concurrent users and API calls the system can handle before performance degrades. Acceptance Criteria: The system should maintain a response time of less than 2 seconds and an error rate below 1% under the expected load for the MVP.
Reliability:
Test Method: Perform automated integration tests to ensure the reliability of data retrieval from banking APIs. Simulate various network conditions and API response scenarios to test the platform’s error handling and data consistency. Metrics: Track the success rate of API calls, the accuracy of retrieved data, and the system’s ability to handle API failures gracefully. Acceptance Criteria: The platform should achieve a success rate of over 99% for API calls, with no critical errors in data retrieval and processing.
Modularity/Extensibility:
Test Method: Evaluate the system’s architecture and codebase for modularity by assessing the ease of adding new features or integrating additional OpenBanking APIs. Review the design patterns and coding practices used to ensure they support extensibility. Metrics: Measure the time and effort required to implement a new feature or integrate a new API. Assess the impact of these additions on the existing codebase and system functionality. Acceptance Criteria: New features or APIs should be integrable within a reasonable timeframe (e.g., 1-2 weeks for a simple feature) without requiring extensive refactoring or causing regressions in existing functionality. Another way to prove extensibility would be by having multiple API’s connected but having them all integrated into the hub of the app using the same patterns even if the methods for authentication and initial retrieval are different, these patterns can be easily diagrammed and then shown in the code.
The MVP focuses on demonstrating the core functionalities and quality attributes of the platform, i.e. logging in and fetching some banking data and putting it into a report which can be easily found via any of the OpenBanking API’s given from NAB, ANZ or the major banks. Future iterations will expand on these features and further refine the evaluation metrics as well as provide a lenders portal to sign in and assess the applicants. Some issue’s may be the front-end forms and dashboard/reports which may take some more time but after designing the first one I am confident we can adjust the level of detail to fit the time-frame if needed. Also achieving the Open Banking Stanards level of security could e an issue.