Who’s in charge of all that Fintech data anyway? Flatfile is on it.

In the short time it took financial services platforms like Paypal, Venmo, and ApplePay to become household names, there has been an explosion of digital apps, brokerages, and blockchain-based trading platforms onto the market. Just take a look at any app store on your device of choice: opportunities to buy and trade local currency, foreign currency, and digital currency abound. Then there are apps for payroll processing, benefits, asset management, digital banking, fraud protection, retail loans, and much more. The amount of data being passed from one system to another is astounding. So, who is making sure that all this data is transferred quickly and securely?

Much of this data transfer happens “in the cloud,” that ubiquitous euphemism that means it occurs over a vast network of databases connected over the Internet using application programming interfaces (APIs) to translate from the language of one system to another. And it truly is a marvel how quickly and conveniently it all happens, especially when you consider the number of disparate systems involved. 

What you may not know is that when two systems are first integrated, the process for joining them is not always as neat as you might imagine. During that first integration — well before that fintech app gets to market —  there is a data onboarding process that requires time and resources to manually process the raw data (customer info., billing addresses, vendor account information, fee percentages, tax codes, etc.) and clean, sort, and prepare it for import to the new system. This critical moment in a new customer relationship (what we call the “first mile of data'') is a potential bottleneck that can delay your product launch or worse, sabotage your projects before they have a chance to get off the ground.

Flatfile was created to eliminate that initial data onboarding bottleneck by facilitating the smooth transfer of massive data sets with little need for human supervision. It is a system that learns from customized guidance and repeats the mundane task of data cleansing with speed, security and efficiency to ensure that your data gets to where it’s going intact.

From the conception of digital currencies in the 1980s to the modern day of crypto, data has provided the backbone of Fintech. This is a world with no room for errors that requires absolute trust that your data is transferred correctly the first time. After all, there is simply no value in a currency that cannot be exchanged quickly and securely. And in a business like this, there are no second chances.

Every day new companies launch with the dream of providing faster, better ways to settle accounts, pay employees, provide benefits, pay service providers, and more. Many of these businesses have no physical assets, only the code that makes them unique among their competitors. Yet, they fuel industry, inject buying power into the economy, and deliver a level of service and satisfaction that no town bank has ever been able to provide. It is a fascinatingly fast world of personalized financial empowerment that gives us the ability to secure our future from just about anywhere in the world. While we may not often think about who is making all this happen behind the scenes, maybe we should.