Minka: Revolutionizing the real-time payments ecosystem with Google Cloud
About Minka
Minka is an open infrastructure for publishing balances. Its network is used by clearing houses, financial institutions, and fintechs to easily and securely move balances between systems and accounts in real time and with no restrictions.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact usMinka has developed a cloud service infrastructure to help companies in the sector provide customers with financial solutions by making it easier to move balances in real time.
Google Cloud results
- 65x growth in monthly transaction processing
- Performance levels amounting to over 10,000 transactions per second
- Deployments in under 10 minutes
Created a network to move money in real time
Minka is an open infrastructure for publishing balances. Its network is used by clearing houses, financial institutions, and fintechs to easily and securely move balances between systems and accounts in real time and with no restrictions.
Operating since 2018 and with 41 partners across Latin America, Europe, and North America, Minka helps organizations create fast, modern, and low-cost financial solutions in just days through its open infrastructure.
In a market where customers, ranging from traditional banks to startups, need to deploy real-time payments, Minka offers custom, flexible solutions to develop systems for digital wallets and banks, clearing houses, loyalty programs, and local currency conversion.
As the tech beyond TransfiYa, the Colombian network of real-time payments and one of the largest interoperable real-time payment systems in the world, the company helps more than 10 million people per month move money in real time.
To this end, Minka leverages Google Cloud solutions, such as Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, and Google Cloud Armor, which have helped it create a platform to publish balances in the cloud using blockchain technology fundamentals. The platform enables fintechs and traditional financial institutions to bring new financial products to life in days rather than months or years.
A necessary infrastructure upgrade
Despite technological breakthroughs in the financial sector, the payment infrastructure, based on cash, cheques, ACHs, and debit/credit cards, is still outdated, risky, and unsuitable for today's digital world.
Traditional financial solutions have scaling issues, and the financial entities end up wasting most of their resources on modernizing and updating their infrastructure.
In this scenario, Minka, bolstered by its experience with Google Cloud solutions, was looking to help financial entities implement modern infrastructures to manage databases and load balances, as well as to scale services efficiently, and support seamless, secure, and user-friendly payment methods.
"By adopting Google Cloud solutions, we now have best practices that help us build everything more securely and efficiently. And we can really focus on what we want to do: helping the financial sector."
—Željko Rumenjak, Chief Technology Officer, MinkaSolutions to support scale
Minka's infrastructure, based on Google Cloud, offers financial sector companies all the services and tools they need for their operations. As the company does not need to focus on solving infrastructure issues, it can invest resources in creating better products and providing added value to customers.
After the initial implementation of App Engine to develop its open-banking platform and grow traffic and scale, Minka expanded the search for other solutions. The company then discovered Google Kubernetes Engine, which provided more flexibility in hosting the platform and enabled the team to react efficiently to sudden load peaks during very short periods of time. Also, Cloud VPN helped set up secure connections to banking systems.
As Minka's service became more popular, the company decided to adopt BigQuery and Looker Studio, which contributed to the analysis of patterns and user behaviors and to the creation of business analytics dashboards quickly and efficiently to make better data-driven decisions.
"The support provided by Google Cloud teams played a major role in helping us tackle both our technical and business challenges. They also helped us connect with potential partners and create new business opportunities."
—Domagoj Rozic, Chief Executive Officer, MinkaBoosting changes in the financial industry
Migrating and transitioning to Google Cloud technologies proved highly efficient for Minka, as the process took place in stages with no impact on production environments.
As its open-banking, cloud-based platform is flexible and reliable, the company has managed to cope with a 65x growth in the monthly processing of transactions with no downtime or security issues. All this on top of results obtained with the initial implementation, which allowed the company to reach performance levels amounting to over 10,000 transactions per second and complete deployments in under 10 minutes.
Thanks to Google Cloud, it is also now easier to deploy new integration services, known as bridges, in the cloud, that connect existing banking systems and communicate with Minka systems through standard protocols.
Today, Minka is capable of offering its customers a reliable, open, and secure solution that modernizes transactional models and goes beyond traditional solutions, based on outdated protocols and legacy technologies that are hard to set up and implement.
"Before our solution based on Google Cloud, users had to enter their account number, name, address, and so on. Now they only need a phone number to make an instant wire transfer. This has massively improved their experience as customers."
—Željko Rumenjak, Chief Technology Officer, MinkaTowards a simplified financial future
Based on its experience with Google Cloud, the company is now planning the next generation of its platform, to be called Minka Ledger, focusing on developers.
Financial institutions will be able to access a cloud-hosted SaaS to create new payment systems and integrate existing ones. This solution will enable development and product teams to come up with new financial services in days instead of months, using transactional core and payment orchestration tools.
The goal is clear: to keep developing tools for those who create financial solutions and to improve the way people in Latin America interact with their money.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Minka
Minka is an open infrastructure for publishing balances. Its network is used by clearing houses, financial institutions, and fintechs to easily and securely move balances between systems and accounts in real time and with no restrictions.