How did a Romanian startup manage to accumulate $60 million in funding?
And Several Great Articles Discussing Big Data Architecture
Photo by Jason Briscoe on Unsplash
CTO’s Focus of the Week
Just how did a Romanian startup company manage to accumulate $60 million in funding?
FintechOS launched in 2017 and is one of several startups disrupting the financial and insurance industries. Traditional banking has found it hard to respond to smaller, more user-friendly offerings that appeal to a broad audience — particularly younger generations. FintechOS provides a low-code platform aimed at giving larger and more conventional banks and insurance providers a boost, helping them build analytics tools and new services more easily.
The fact that banks need these tools is evidenced by the speed at which FintechOS raised $60 million for its second round of funding. The infrastructure of larger, older banks and insurance companies simply isn’t fit for purpose when compared to Insurtech startups such as Level, a New York financial product provider encouraging the view that insurance is “just a way to pay for things.”
Level amassed $27 million in funding in late 2020, a feat announced this April. The startup focuses on providing the finance behind company benefits such as dental and vision plans. The firm aims to make company benefits more appealing than salary and already has links with over 100,000 providers.
These newbies in the finance world are simplifying the process of getting loans and claiming insurance or company benefits, waving goodbye to endless application forms and 30-day wait times for acceptance. Why would anyone go with a traditional bank when a newer, digital offering can provide a financial decision in as little as four hours?
FintechOS aims to hand some of the power back to the big-name financial providers, allowing them to stay relevant as they move into the future. Those big names include JPMorgan Chase, an investment banking giant that’s thrown itself into the fintech ring with its QuickAccept pay system that’s in direct competition with established digital rival, Square. Moves like this make the big banks more accessible to smaller businesses, sole traders, and anyone who needs quick and easy payment options for customers or clients.
Fintech and insurtech are terms we’re sure to hear more of now that the big banks are getting on board. It will be interesting to see how the smaller and — up until now — more innovative companies respond.
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Our Video of the Week: Best Online Courses for Data Engineers
You asked: What data courses should I take to become a data engineer? We’ve answered that in our video, but here’s a quick summary of the key facts.
I’ve taken my fair share of courses on YouTube, Coursera, Udemy, and just about every other possible platform. You can go from not really knowing anything about data engineering, data science, or data infrastructure to developing an end-to-end data solution. Let’s go over some of the top data engineering courses you can take to help improve your skills and really give you a competitive edge when it comes to working as a data engineer.
Wise Owl Training on YouTube has several playlists on SQL server that specifically focus on aspects such as SQL server integration services, SQL server queries, and other topics that are very Microsoft-driven. SSIS is utilized as an extraction, transformation and loading tool, making it easy to drag and drop different destinations into a workspace, connecting them all and creating dependencies, essentially developing something close to an ETL.
These videos don’t always provide the higher-level architecture of what you’re doing. They explain how to do certain tasks but not why you would want to do them. Also, some of the tools explained on Wise Owl are becoming outdated. However, these videos provide a great baseline for anyone who wants to get started.
Another free resource: The Apache Airflow Tutorials that I used when I was first learning Airflow. They provide a good, basic understanding of Airflow and how you can use it. There are only seven videos, but there’s a good amount of information there.
Moving away from the free resources, Udemy offers instruction in high-level design topics such as ETLs and data warehouses. There’s one course in particular that I enjoyed, Data Warehouse Fundamentals for Beginners. This course allows anyone to quickly get up to speed on what goes into building a data warehouse. The course is well-rated and has plenty of students. More important, it doesn’t just cover specific tools. It’s about understanding data warehousing concepts, which allows you to use a multitude of tools.
Learning about big data is the next natural step toward being a data engineer in the modern world. That’s why I recommend taking the Udemy course, Big Data on Amazon Web Services. The videos are longer than other courses but contain a lot of information and provide great insights into what you can do in cloud computing.
One instructor I particularly like is Frank Kane, who has a huge following on Udemy. A great thing about his courses is you get the opportunity to do some hands-on work, like in the Apache Spark and Python course.
Another key area that’s important to understand, especially because it’s changing so rapidly, is the concept of data lakes. I’d recommend taking the Coursera course, Introduction to Designing Data Lakes on AWS. It’s free unless you want a certificate. This course contains many concepts that are key if you want to become a successful data engineer.
For more detail on what to expect from each of these courses and how they might benefit you, and to help choose the next course we look at, watch the video here.
Articles Worth Reading - Architecture Edition
This week in the Articles Worth reading section, we wanted to share several articles we thought would be great for our readers who enjoy designing complex systems.
Cannes: How ML saves us $1.7M a year on document previews
The Dropbox Previews feature allows users to view a file without downloading the content. In addition to thumbnail previews, Dropbox also offers an interactive Previews surface with sharing and collaborating capabilities, including comments and tagging other users.
Their internal system for securely generating file previews, Riviera, handles preview generation for the hundreds of supported file types. It does this by chaining together various content transformation operations to create the preview assets appropriate for that file type. For example, Riviera might rasterize a page from a multi-page PDF document to show a high-resolution preview on the Dropbox web surface.
Data movement for Google services at Netflix
Netflix Studio is creating many hundreds of titles per year and a lot of this information is in varied data sources. In the Data Platform organization they find their partners at Netflix Studio using services like Google Sheets and Google Drive for day to day operations. At the same time, we have the need to have this information in their Data warehouse for Data scientists to analyze the data. This has resulted in upwards of 20,000,000 files in Google Drive in varying formats (Sheets, Drive blobs, Docs and Slides).
With this proliferation of use cases requiring programmatic access to different Google services there were two major issues which needed to be tackled.
Application owners and data scientists were managing security credentials and reusing code to authenticate with Google. They would otherwise have to set up separate GCP cloud projects to authenticate their projects. This made the bar higher for transferring data between Google services and our data warehouse.
There was also a huge observability gap about what data was moving from the Data warehouse to Google and vice versa
Read How They Solved These Problems Here
Companies We Are Watching
Remember those disruptive and innovative fintech companies we were excited about? Here are three more to watch right now.
Payhawk
Payhawk bills itself as the “financial system of tomorrow,” providing a single interface to manage multiple aspects of business finance, such as corporate credit cards, payments and invoicing, and expenses. Unlike similar offerings, Payhawk provides each user with an international bank account number, so customers can receive payments from anywhere.
The innovative startup recently raised $20 million in funding, showing how keen companies are to tighten up their finances, making life more flexible for employees and cost-effective for organizations.
Chargebee
Recently valued at $1.4 billion, Chargebee continues to receive enthusiastic investment thanks to its innovative approach to business billing and compliance. Chargebee focuses on businesses that want to set up subscription services, which can be a challenging and fraught process. Chargebee makes setting up and managing subscriptions simple, but it’s also completely scalable, growing with businesses as they do.
Having tripled in value in the last six months and with a fresh $125 million investment reported in April 2021, this is a fintech company to watch.
Capitolis
Another player in the realm of transforming the way banks operate, Capitolis focuses on the capital market and investment banks. This software-as-a-service platform uses proprietary algorithms to manage trading positions via collaboration with a range of financial institutions. The success of this shows in a sixfold revenue increase throughout 2020 and a recent investment of $90 million from a huge range of big names, including the aforementioned JPMorgan, plus Citi and Index Ventures, to name but a few.
The End Of Day Five
Fintech and insurtech are the future of banking and investment.
Yes, you can learn to be a data engineer online — and there are even free resources available.
And, for anyone excited about emerging technologies and data, keeping an eye on certain companies in the fintech world is a great way to keep your finger on the pulse of where SaaS platforms and other digital tools are heading next.
As always, get in touch with any comments or questions!