In the fast-paced world of fintech, staying ahead of the competition requires a modern, agile, and scalable software platform. At Interhyp, we're working onour new mortgage brokering platform: HOME. It is designed for customers, mortgage brokers, our B2B partners and banks: with modern software architecture principles, to streamline the mortgage brokering process with an intuitive, efficient experience.At the same time,we are enablingbanks to make use of a digital-first process to ensure fast and efficient credit decisions.

There are three main technological and architectural principles that help us in fulfill this goal:

Microservices

One of the core principles of our architecture are microservices. By breaking down our platform into smaller, independent components, we're able to easily modify or replace individual services without affecting the entire application. This means that we can quickly adapt to changing business needs and scale our platform as our partner base grows. By building microservices that are purpose-built for specific tasks, we can ensure that our platform remains flexible, reliable, and efficient.

Microservices can be optimized for different use cases. Our most important examples are highly performant and frequently used microservices for interest rate calculations that are critical for mortgage brokering.Depending on the use case, different scaling of the services or even different architectural patterns can be used within these services.Another benefit is the fact that the impact radius of system failure is smaller than in monolithic systems.

Event Driven Architecture

Another key technology we're using is an eventdriven architecture. In an event-driven architecture, services communicate through events, which are messages that are sent as soon as relevant business events happen in the system. This allows our services to be loosely coupled and scalable, as they are able to react to events as they occur, without requiring tight integration or synchronous dependency on other services.

" Building a platform never is the task of the lone ranger, but the task of a team that cooperates with other teams and integrates stakeholders on all the myriads of different levels we are working on together "

However, the tradeoff of event driven architecture should also be clear: some aspects of software development like error handling in the user interface, infrastructural aspects or finding bugs can be more challenging than they are in a classic synchronously integrated architecture. Thus, the decision in favor of this architectureshould be a very informed and deliberate one:Do the benefits of higher resilience, flexibility and decoupling overweigh these challenges? For us, they do – they enable us to be highly connected with our bank partners and B2B partners and still provide the required system stability.

MicroFrontends

This modular way of working with our partners also shows in the microfrontends we are using, with custom plugins, which allow us tooffer very individual solutions and integrations to our partners. They allow us to develop our user interface as a collection of independent, reusable components, each with its own state and behavior. This means that we can build a customized user interface for each partner, based on their specific needs and preferences. We will integrate these micro-frontends in different web applications in various lookandfeels, all with the same module and same code.

For example, a partner who specializes in refinancing might see different options than a partner who specializes in first-time homebuyers. Or we can include the same data entry module in different contexts for different customer groups or partners. At the same time, we can also include frontend modules of our partners in our platform to offer their customers all tools at one place.

In conclusion,building a platform never is the task of the lone ranger, but the task of a team that cooperates with other teams and integrates stakeholders on all the myriads of different levels we are working on together. But it feels good to see stakeholders find their place on the platform and actually draw their profit: for our customers this is the best offer there is on the market, for banks to create substantial new income within no time and for the banking partners to use the platform in a white label way – as if it was their own.