Understanding PSD2 Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) requirements and how to implement them in digital banking platforms.
Key Takeaways
- Compliance requirements vary significantly across jurisdictions
- Transaction monitoring systems must balance detection rates with false positives
- Regular audit trail reviews are essential for regulatory readiness
- Technology choices have direct regulatory implications
Introduction
Financial technology infrastructure demands a fundamentally different approach than typical web applications. The systems we build must handle not only massive throughput but also maintain strict consistency guarantees, comprehensive audit trails, and regulatory compliance across multiple jurisdictions.
Regulatory Note
Key Concepts
Understanding the foundational concepts is critical before diving into implementation details. Financial systems operate under constraints that require careful consideration of consistency models, failure handling, and data integrity guarantees.
Every architectural decision in a financial system carries compounding effects. A choice made at the data layer propagates through the API surface, affects operational procedures, and ultimately determines what regulatory controls are feasible.
Architecture Overview
The architecture follows a layered approach with clear boundaries between the API gateway, business logic services, and the persistence layer. Each layer has specific responsibilities for validation, transformation, and durability guarantees.
Peak throughput across all tenants
Platform availability target
End-to-end processing time
Implementation
Implementation follows a phased approach, starting with core transaction processing and building outward to reporting, reconciliation, and real-time notification systems. Each phase includes comprehensive testing against production-like workloads.
Compliance Alert
The best financial infrastructure is invisible to the end user but provides absolute certainty to every stakeholder in the transaction chain.— Compliance Team
Conclusion
Building financial infrastructure requires balancing competing demands: performance vs. consistency, flexibility vs. compliance, and speed of development vs. operational safety. The patterns described in this article have been validated across production workloads and represent our current best thinking on these tradeoffs.