As we launch the Drip Tech Portal, I am excited to share with you the engineering challenges and projects that the Product and Engineering Teams at Drip Capital are presently working on to create relevant financial solutions for Small-Mid-size (SMB) exporters and importers worldwide.
Our primary financing products Receivable Factoring (RF) and Supply Chain Finance (SCF) have evolved significantly over the past five years to efficiently provide financing to SMB exporters and importers. Applying valuable insights gathered from our own experiences and stakeholder interactions, we have continuously improved the products to better support and meet our customer needs.
As we expand and introduce the products to new markets, three key product design aspects begin to emerge:
Easily customizable product workflows to meet new regional requirements. Accurate and easily configurable risk analytics models / risk variables in policies to deal with credit risk, fraud, commercial disputes for different regions and product types. Minimize the turnaround time (TAT) for completing the financial transaction including the time taken for risk analysis and data gathering.
In order to meet the above requirements, the product and engineering teams at Drip Capital are redesigning the user interfaces (UI) and backend systems to ensure ease of customization and assembly of UI elements and backend micro services. The new design provides us with the capability to create new workflows, easily modify existing workflows that interact with the customer, and reuse UI elements across products. Providing multi language support to our customers and the ability to use the product on mobile devices via native apps built for iPhone and Android devices (available on App Store and Google Play Store) are also an important aspect to consider.
We are also redesigning some of our monolithic backend systems--initially built with Ruby on Rails-- into micro services using Go and Python to ensure increased adaptability and versatility. Our datastore was formerly based primarily on MySQL and now we have increasingly begun to use MongoDB, Redis, Influx to meet the reduced latency, cross-region replication and enhanced availability requirements of the core backend systems. We are primarily on AWS but have started to utilize Google cloud for specialized machine learning (ML) evaluations.
The ability to continuously update risk analytic ML models is especially crucial for our financial products to run effectively. The need to maintain models for multiple products customized for 100’s of locations worldwide requires us to maintain and manage a complex MLOps pipeline that is built on top of the data warehouse and data lake. The MLOps pipeline provides continuous integration of data and evaluation feedback, helps data analysts and risk management teams to evaluate results and provides the tools to run new experiments and create new models.
We integrate the data that correlates to risk variables from multiple external vendors, public data sources, online sources, and government agencies worldwide. This integration of data helps us in embedding new risk management techniques in the product, as well as identifying and mitigating the emerging risks.
Another design aspect that the team is focusing on to reduce TAT is implementing automation to replace manual processes and run tasks in parallel. Import-export documents in different languages and formats pose an interesting challenge to solve as we build automated systems that parse data from documents provided by our customers. The data points gathered from the documents are further analyzed and used for risk analysis and financing terms. This will be an area of continued focus for innovation as we strive to get to a TAT of under an hour.
The Product and Engineering Teams at Drip Capital are poised to take on the evolving cross border trade tech stack challenges and provide effective tools for trade and trade financing. In the upcoming blog posts, members of the team will dive deeper into specific areas mentioned above. We will also explore other readworthy and relevant topics in our blog. Thank you for your interest and stay tuned for exciting trade tech updates!
Whats next:
We are living in an interconnected global environment where even localized changes impact everyone--from climate change to political issues, the butterfly effect is felt globally. This is especially true when it comes to cross border trade.
Evolved over centuries into a complex system, cross border trade has its own checks and balances to protect the parties that are involved in case of unexpected events during the lengthy trade process. Nevertheless, the existing cross border mechanisms are being stretched even more by recent world events such as geopolitical changes, the pandemic, congestion in ports, rising labour costs, container shortages, etc.
The present scenario raises many pertinent questions: how do importers, exporters and all parties involved in cross border trade deal with increasing levels of uncertainty, rapidly rising demand, and labour shortages? Can technology alleviate some of the challenges and help importers and exporters ride the wave of change?
Our future blog posts will tackle the above questions. Please keep coming back, as we offer solutions and critical insights regarding emerging trends, news, and all matters related to cross border trade tech.
