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The Digital Finance Revolution, Open Banking, and APIs

Technological innovation is disrupting the financial industry. In the last couple of years, many fintech banks and digital finance startups have emerged. These new firms, like Simple, Chime, Varo, and Moven, claim to offer consumers more choice, better service, and lower costs. Meanwhile, global giants like PayPal and Amazon are exploring offering select banking features. Nonetheless, many of the big players in fintech are also transforming digitally.

What Is Driving the Open Banking Movement?

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are at the heart of the digital finance revolution, along with the shift towards open banking around the world, meaning that banks are increasingly giving third parties access to their financial data. First developed in the UK, open banking has since spread to the EU, directly stimulated by regulatory initiatives. These include the Second Payment Service Directive (PSD2), which compels banks to provide their customer data to third-party providers (TPPs) through open APIs.

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How to Choose the Right Digital Experience Monitoring Solution

Today’s business landscape is increasingly competitive, demanding that companies maintain an agile mindset when differentiating their products and services from competing brands. For many organizations, this differentiation comes in the form of better user engagement strategies designed to improve the availability and reliability of web services and applications.

But while most businesses understand the basic concept of managing the “digital experience” of their customers, many do not recognize the key ingredients to its long-term success—performance monitoring and optimization.

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A BGP Guide for the Non-Network Engineer

What Is BGP?

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the Internet’s primary routing protocol. It has been described as the protocol that “makes the Internet work” because it plays such an important role in allowing traffic to move quickly and efficiently.

The original function of BGP was to carry internet reachability information between edge routers (it is sometimes described as a reachability protocol). It has since expanded to also carry routes for VPNs, IPv6, Multicast, and a range of other data. BGP provides network stability as it guarantees routers can rapidly adapt to send packets via a different connection if one Internet pathway goes down. It does this by exchanging routing information across the Internet, through the use of BGP-speaking routers and routing tables.

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The Challenges of Ajax CDN

For the longest time, hosting static files on CDNs was the de facto standard for performance tuning website pages. The host offered browser caching advantages, better stability, and storage on fast edge servers across strategic geolocations. Not only did it have performance benefits, but it was also convenient for developers. Recent developments, however, show that self-hosting static files such as Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and jQuery libraries, CSS styles, and other include directives are faster, more reliable, and add better security to the system.

Possible Performance Degradation from CDN Usage

Most developers and administrators think that adding a CDN-hosted static file improves performance. The idea has been that a CDN has fast edge servers that cache content and deliver it based on the user’s geolocation. These cached servers are faster than a traditional single hosting server, and the developers got the benefit of convenience.