Part 2: Different challenges

Part 2 of this article is largely around different challenges I faced when stepping out of what I had psychologically deemed 'the comfort zone'. If you missed the first article then you can catch up here.

So where are we? just to recap I am working as a CTO at an African fintech, far from home. Theres a great team there building the platform of the future and we faced many challenges and unknowns along our journey.

?? Integrations and 3rd parties

The comfort of what we are used to in the western world is high availability and zero downtime. So when building prototypes at pace we generally code - what I call 'offensively' to demo something quickly. This is connect our codebase or service to an API, Post a request, receive a 200 OK and all is hunky dory. After all from an integration perspective we are integrated with a third party and we are happy. The sprint demo shows working tech and everyone feels warm and fluffy. But what about resilience? Surely this will involve more work and take us away from perceived 'business value'?

The trouble we found with 3rd parties in Africa is that we don't have that high availability. At best, 85% of the time a 3rd party was up or had its endpoints or even request body changed with not much notice given.

One in particular was Safaricom's M-PESA network 'could' go down. This itself would cause national chaos as 90% of the countries economy would grind to a halt. I witnessed that a couple of times being in the office, a outage would occur and team members couldn't get home as they were low on fuel and relied on their M-PESA wallets to fill up again.

Another example is you could have an outage where no API callbacks were being broadcast by the 3rd party so you'd never know in some cases if a transaction had been completed or not.

The downstream effects of third party service outages were huge. From a reconciliation perspective a nightmare for the finance department to reconcile what has been disbursed our side vs what M-PESA has actually disbursed on their infrastructure to the end customer. An accounting nightmare and regular challenge.

???? Enter resilience...defensive coding and process automation

So what is defensive programming? It is a technique that helps programmers to write programs that are more resistant to bugs and vulnerabilities. This particularly becomes important when working out of your system boundaries with third parties.

These techniques are actually a set of programming guidelines and habits that will immeasurably improve your comprehension, quality and predictability. The greater onus is placed on the items above with exception handling, unit testing and automation also coming into the fold.

So lets look at the issues faced earlier, Resilience is critical. To overcome the down time issues I decided to take two actions. First was to schedule in some good old fashioned defensive coding and infrastructure improvements with AWS EventBridge.

Introducing AWS EventBridge would mean we can decouple from a synchronous operation from the code in our service and begin to operationalise by bringing some resilience in. In effect by having an asynchronous queueing setup, Our events are now able to be queued and sent on demand giving us a scaled and decoupled process. In the event of downtime the events stay safe in the message bus ready for processing later when normal service has resumed.

The second order was to ask our SRE Team to start looking business operations during down time. For example there was a manual process that shows transactions on an M-PESA portal which transactions have been sent when you give your time span to query. This is a physical report that a user has to go through and reconcile. Why don't we automate this process?

AS a Finance USER
I WANT to automate reconciliations when M-PESA has an outage 
SO THAT we don't have to perform this manually        

Ok so lets do it!

???? Other challenges, leadership and emotional

Nairobi itself is a beautiful place, A wonderful hive of activity and colour with an incredible amount of hustle and bustle. Traffic itself is a huge problem at certain parts of the day. A 10 minute car journey can become a 2 hour one very quickly if someone breaks down which happens to the best of us when we least suspect it.

The scene above was in the middle of a cross road, A fully loaded matatu (taxi-bus) had broken down, lots of tooting and beeping of horns and the passengers refused to dismount. Cars backed up as far as the eye can see in all directions.

Steve Clark COO at the time jumped out and began to clear the blockage himself then eventually others joined into help and the blockage was gone. Everyone could get on with their day.

It was a great reminder that we are all facing the same problem but takes only one of us to lead and the rest will come to help.

Being away from home and family was a challenge, certainly for the longer periods however being in Kenya, we were never far from amazing scenery and nature.

Weekends were usually filled with White Cap (national beer) fuelled hikes to take in some breath taking scenery.

We took a trip up north to the funeral of a well loved colleagues son who sadly passed away. It was a difficult day but all our team came to support him and his family. I was asked to say some words on behalf of the company on what was also the anniversary of my fathers passing 11 years ago.

A 5 hour drive round round Mt Kenya, The country was really beginning to show off its stunning scenery.

?? Summary

Thanks for having a read. If the opportunity comes for you to step out of your comfort zone then I thoroughly recommend it. I've got some amazing memories from my time in Africa that I'll cherish. Its not easy with a family at home but an incredible opportunity to grow and bring some new learnings back. Even after 24 years and in what is now the leadership space, its important to keep learning and building new experiences.

The opportunity to build technology in a different environment is incredibly rewarding especially in the informal sector. Its truly life changing here for the consumer.

I think David M. Brear coined the term "Digital banking is only 1% finished" and I believe that, The industry has a long way to go. I'll be taking a 'challenger' mindset forward in future roles where we can truly innovate and digitise the industry but balance the need of humans.

I'm all in for digitising the banking sector as it has many efficiencies associated but balancing the needs of humans that need to speak to a physical person is also important. We are in a technology led society but also need to remember that its there to serve us, the humans.

#transformation #technology #innovation #digitalbanking