How to build a modern banking app with Google Cloud

Google Cloud developer advocate Priyanka Vergadia proposes a 2022 architecture for a modular digital bank. The goal is to let multiple apps and partners reuse banking capabilities—such as opening accounts or making payments—through APIs instead of building a separate connection to the core bank for each channel.

Key Points Covered

• Banking as a service exposes capabilities to partners: Small services behind a shared API layer let retailers, for example, offer loans or buy-now-pay-later options at checkout. Vergadia argues that modularity speeds product delivery; the claimed reduction from months or years to days is a proposed benefit, not a measured result 01:04–03:11(opens in a new tab).
• Separate business responsibilities before choosing products: Customer and partner channels handle interaction; integration connects systems; the data platform supports analysis; back-office applications handle finance and regulatory reporting; core banking stores and processes accounts, transactions, cards, and payments. Security and operations apply across all of them 03:11–06:23(opens in a new tab).
• The data pipeline serves analysis separately from transactions: In the 2022 design, Apigee manages APIs, Cloud Storage receives batch data, Pub/Sub receives events, and Dataflow transforms data for BigQuery analysis and model development 06:23–08:30(opens in a new tab).
• Core services communicate through events: Vergadia places them on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), with customer, product, and transaction data in Spanner and messages in Pub/Sub. Identity, data location, encryption, logging, and incident monitoring span the design rather than belonging to a single banking function 08:30–10:38(opens in a new tab).

Full video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EBCMNoYvfc(opens in a new tab)