Golang For Fintech App Development: Benefits & Use Cases

Table of Contents

The Need of FinTech Industry

FinTech applications deal with heaps of customer information, data, and meet the 24*7 requirements of customers. As a result, applications must offer a smooth and efficient service without any lags and system crashes. This is a major reason the existing FinTech companies, startups, and financial service decision-makers prefer Golang for their application development. As per the nature of the project, your developers can use the language to fit in certain parts of your app or use it entirely.

Originally, Golang was introduced to complete heavy-load tasks. It is built with a mix of features from different languages. It simplifies, eases, and meets the requirements of developers and organizations. Since its release, Go has never failed to meet the expectations. Hence, one reason to use Golang for FinTech is its ability to perform multiple tasks.

Advantages of Using Golang for Fintech Application Development

Security, Speed, and Scalability are the prime demands of a Fintech solution and Golang rightly fits these requirements. Hence, Go for Fintech with Golang!

Go is a statically typed language. It enables compilers to go through the source code quite early, thereby averting and fixing all the potential errors at its emergence. Although it shares several similarities with other languages, specifically Python and C++, a lot of developers have transitioned to Golang recently. There are a wide range of fintech companies too, that are considering switching to Golang for their application development. Let’s take a closer look at the chief advantages of using Golang in FinTech industry for app development.

🟠 Handling High-Load Services

Applications in the FinTech sector need to run seamlessly 24*7. Furthermore, this industry calls for identifying and resolving errors rapidly besides offering high-load services like online messaging, chats, and the requests that need to be addressed and processed efficiently. Herein, holding the power to run multiple apps simultaneously thereby addressing each responsibility individually, Golang is well-built to meet the high load requirements.

🟠 Excellent Performance

The second most outstanding advantage of using Golang for FinTech industry is its performance. All thanks to its efficient garbage collection feature. Because Go is built into binary, it can run directly with the hardware without the need for an additional layer like Java Virtual Machine. Under complex and challenging situations, Go stands out among all the other languages in terms of performance.

🟠 Simplicity

One great example to prove this feature calls for highlighting the payment giant American Express. Owing to its simplicity, the company states that Golang is a straightforward and easy-to-learn language. Developers with little knowledge can master the programming language within a month, and beginners can get a solid grip on its basics within a short period.

🟠 Unmatched Memory management

Memory management is another important aspect of the FinTech industry. Endowed with this feature, Golang assigns blocks to multiple running programs, thereby handling, monitoring, and coordinating each one of them at a system level. Golang ensures that the system memory is optimized at a top-tier level by performing these activities.

🟠 Static typing

Languages that employ static typing instead of dynamic typing have a shallow learning curve. Developers can easily pick up code failures and rectify them in Golang, unlike a programming language that uses dynamic typing. Eventually, developers benefit from the speed and accuracy of the language in which the code can be written throughout their fintech app development journey.

🟠 High Security

This is one of the crucial benefits of using Go in FinTech industry. The finance industry is one such field that is prone to be targeted by cybercriminals. Statistics show that more than 1/4th of all malware attacks occur at financial institutions and banks. Access to customer data has been very easy with techniques like reverse engineering, clickjacking, etc. However, Golang has the perfect set of tools that makes codes and applications extremely secure. One such fine example is the Go Module. Typically, Golang offers 3 symmetric encryption algorithms packages, namely, base64, AES, and DES. To make your application safe, you can ask your developer to adhere to the finest security practices, like:

• Employing template/HTML package to encode web content, thereby protecting users from cross-site scripting attacks
• Using the static binding feature of Go along with minimal base images in containers to reduce the possibility of the container attack surface.

🟠 Concurrency

One of the chief premises on which Go was built includes its capacity to run programs separately from one another. Considering the fact that Golang enables multiple apps to run simultaneously, it makes use of its simple built-in goroutines that offers incredible flexibility and speed, unlike Java. Summing up, this concurrency feature makes Golang for FinTech a preferred partner by delivering better performance.

🟠 Cross-platform compatibility

Fintech applications are incomplete without cross-platform compatibility functionality. Golang offers excellent cross-platform compatibility by enabling software or devices to run across one or more OS or hardware platforms. As a result, when a firm uses this language, it can grab access to a broader audience by providing them access to apps across multiple devices/platforms like smartphones, tablets, and laptops.

🟠 Excellent Scalability

Building a fintech application is not sufficient. When firms decide to launch a fintech app, it is imperative to make sure that the system will be robust enough to handle a significant growth in the number of users. After all, this is the primary need for any startup/company to leverage its market share. Herein, Golang offers excellent tools to its developers with the help of its concurrent Goroutines to build a performant and scalable solution. Unlike traditional architecture, Goroutines enables one single process to serve a slew of requests simultaneously. This makes it a preferred language for a lot of Fintech developers at the current times.

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Top Fintech Companies Using Golang To Enhance Their Offerings

It is essential for businesses to scale up their operations in the growth phase along with enhancing their solutions at the same time to stay ahead in the market. The moment a firm loses its momentum, they may experience a major backdrop. Considering this, many fintech firms are using the best possible solution to stay in the lead. Below is a description of the top four fintech firms that have employed Golang in their application development. There are prominent reasons why use Golang for your project. According to these finance giants, adopting Golang has benefited them and their users. Let’s have a look.

Golang In MercadoLibre App Development

MercadoLibre hosts the most popular e-commerce ecosystem in Latin America. Founded in 1999, MercadoLibre exists in more than 18 countries globally. It was back in 2015 when they chose to switch their API platform to a modern and scalable one. MercadoLibre experienced a slow build and deployment time.

As a result, the developers decided to transition to Golang instead of Groovy on Grails, which was initially selected for the application development. Groovy и Grails is a dynamic language. On the contrary, Golang is a static type language. Today, MercadoLibre achieved what it yearned for. It has a fast and scalable system that processes 20 million requests in one minute.

Golang has helped MercadoLibre in several fields ever since. Some of them include,

• Improving the system’s efficiency
• Unmatched scalability
• Traffic handling with the help of Go applications
• As a recruiting tool
• Outstanding simplicity

“I think that the tour of Go is by far the best introduction to a language that I’ve seen. It’s really simple, and it gives you a fair overview of probably 80 percent of the language. When we want to get developers to learn Go, and to get to production fast, we tell them to start with the tour of Go.” -Eric Kohan, Software Engineering Manager, MercadoLibre.

Golang in Monzo App Backend

Located in the United Kingdom, Monzo is another famous digital bank founded in 2015. The developers at Monzo employ a large variety of additional tools to build an efficient online banking system. At that time, the organization realized the importance of scalability and decided to scale the app at the earliest. The team wanted to develop their application with the help of a microservice architecture over a monolithic one.

Golang, being a dominant language, is widely used by banks to write its microservices. Hence, the team decided to choose Golang over any other language to implement its backend service. Here’s how Golang helped Monzo in its app development.

• Efficient and automatic optimization of memory management through Go’s garbage collector feature
• Minimal bugs at the runtime. All thanks to the static typing in Golang
• Golang holds concurrency primitives that can result in speedy performance and fine resource utilization when required to scale their app.

“Go is a perfect language for creating microservice architectures, and the concurrency features, and the language in general, has allowed the easy creation of small and simple networked services at Monzo that are focused around the ‘single responsibility principle.” Matt Heath, Distributed Systems Engineer, Monzo Bank.

Go in American Express Systems

Another finance firm that has experienced phenomenal results using Golang is American Express. With the increased volume of transactions, American Express started seeking a perfect solution to renovate and modernize its payment infrastructure.

Developers at American Express started testing a range of languages like Node.js, C++, Golang, and Java. Eventually, Golang ranked second in terms of performance. Although it processed 140,000 requests per second, it possessed a plethora of benchmarking, testing frameworks, and profiling features. Upon employing Golang for building its payment microservices, American Express noticed a significant stake in its real-time transaction processing speed. Developers at American Express do not wish to switch to other languages anytime soon because,

• Golang is simple. Developers having a basic understanding and experience in programming languages can take a firm grip on Golang in a short span.
• It offers the best practices that include unmatched error handling. Godocs is another excellent feature.
• Enhances microservices and speeds up productivity.

“What makes Go different from other programming languages is cognitive load. You can do more with less code, which makes it easier to reason about and understand the code that you do end up writing.” -Glen Balliet, Engineering Director of loyalty platforms, American Express.

“It’s fast, built for concurrency, easy to learn, and encourages best practices.”
-Benjamin Cane, Principal Engineer, American Express.

Golang in PayPal Payment Processing Platform

With a rise in user base, PayPal decided to leverage its system to offer excellent stability. Initially, the company used a NoSQL database system. However, it switched to Golang in order to program its SDN (Software Defined Networking) infrastructure. Later, all the other development teams started adopting Golang. Golang has helped PayPal by offering unmatched tools, libraries, simplicity, scalability, and concurrency, besides assisting the payment gateway to run smoothly.

In fact, with Golang’s simplicity, efficiency, and quick compilation of machine code, the development team at PayPal has experienced a tremendous increase in productivity with a drop in CPU load by 10%.

• Golang modernizes PayPal’s systems and lowers the time-to-market.
• Covering all the major requirements of the platform, Golang is well-built with features like concurrent and parallel programming, high performance, portable, coupled with modular, and has a composable open-source architecture.
• Benefits developers with its quick compilation to garbage collection and machine code.

“Go provides channels and routines to deal with complexity, we were able to structure the code to meet our requirements.”-Bala Natarajan, Sr. Director of Engineering, Developer Experience at PayPal.

Golang for Fintech: Final Verdict

There are a slew of factors that play a significant role in contributing to a company’s success. Because most web services and mobile banking applications are the chief ways of communication between FinTech firms and customers, it is vital to build a robust application with unmatched stability, security, and speed. Using Golang in FinTech can offer incomparable benefits. Golang is known for attributes like compilation speed, simplicity, and concurrency. While developing FinTech offerings, it is important that you choose a language that develops groundbreaking banking services and is scalable and flexible simultaneously. Serving all the central banking and FinTech app requirements, Golang is a great choice and is well-equipped to adapt to evolving customer requirements and industry trends.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Are there any limitations to using Go for fintech applications?

Some of the barriers when using Go for Fintech are:

• Go does not have a built-in garbage collector like some other programming languages, which can make memory management more difficult.
• Go is not as popular as some other programming languages like Python and Java, so there may be a smaller community and fewer resources available.

Which libraries and frameworks are commonly used for building fintech applications with Go?

Go has a variety of libraries and frameworks that are commonly used for building fintech applications, including the Go standard library, Go-Micro, Go-Kit, and Go-Finance.

Which fintech companies use Go in production?

There are many fintech companies are using Go in production, including Square, Robinhood, and Kraken.