Financial services has always been a step ahead. From electronic trading floors to instant payments, the industry was among the first to showcase the power of event-driven architectures.
The problem? No straight-forward way to design, govern & publish asynchronous APIs. Without that consistency, most implementations turn into custom, one-off builds that are difficult to scale, costly to maintain, and hard to govern across teams.
In this blog, we’ll discuss how to streamline those raw streams into governed, reusable data products that not only simplify operations but also create a foundation for innovation, compliance, and customer experience.
Market Trends & Reports
The financial sector as a whole is experiencing rapid growth, creating strong momentum for data-driven transformation.
- The financial services market is projected to grow from USD 33.7 trillion in 2024 to nearly USD 36.3 trillion in 2025, and could reach USD 48.4 trillion by 2029. This expansion reflects a sustained 7–8% CAGR across the sector (Fortune Business Insights, Research and Markets).
- Within this, fintech innovation is outpacing traditional growth. The global fintech segment alone is expected to reach USD 1.13 trillion by 2032, fueled by a 16.2% CAGR.
- The financial services application market is forecast to increase from USD 163 billion in 2024 to USD 234 billion by 2030, at a 6.2% CAGR (Research and Markets).
These trends point to a sector under pressure to scale quickly, deliver real-time digital experiences, and ensure compliance. The only sustainable path forward is through scalable, real-time data infrastructures where data is treated as a governed product rather than a one-off integration.
Challenges Facing FinServ Today
Despite massive investments in digital transformation, FinServ organizations face persistent roadblocks:
- Inconsistent Designs: Without standards, every team builds event-driven APIs differently, creating fragmentation and friction.
- Governance Gaps: Compliance and auditability are difficult when APIs cannot be described and enforced consistently across domains.
- Limited Reuse: Event streams often remain one-off integrations instead of reusable data products that can serve multiple use cases.
- Security Risks: If security is not handled properly, custom solutions leave critical gaps that fraud and cyberattacks can exploit.
- Scaling Bottlenecks: Custom implementations slow down innovation and drive up costs as systems expand.
These challenges make it clear: FinServ needs a new paradigm where data is streaming, governed, and reusable across the enterprise.
The Power of Data Products
Financial organizations already collect and generate massive volumes of data from transactions and customer interactions to compliance checks and market feeds. But the challenge is turning data into value at speed and scale using a reusable process.
Data Products make this possible. They transform data into governed, consumable, reusable assets that can be leveraged across business units.
Here are some high-impact use cases:
- Personalization and KYC: Delivering hyper-personalized offers and onboarding experiences.
- Fraud Detection: Real-time monitoring of transactions to prevent losses.
- Regulatory Compliance: Ensuring transparency, auditability, and data governance.
- Market Data as a Service: Empowering trading platforms with low-latency insights.
- Customer Engagement: Enabling event-driven alerts, notifications, and support.
- Risk Management: Integrating real-time risk models into decision-making.
Shift-Left Architecture for FinServ
Financial services organizations are under constant pressure to deliver faster innovation, stronger compliance, and better customer experiences. Traditionally, these goals were pursued late in the development cycle, often during final testing or post-production monitoring.
The result was costly rework, compliance risks, and slow time-to-market.
Enter Shift-Left Architecture, an approach that moves critical considerations like security, compliance, observability, and performance earlier in the software delivery lifecycle.
By integrating these requirements from the start, financial institutions can build resilient, compliant, and customer-ready systems faster.
Why Shift-Left Matters?
The FinServ sector faces unique challenges that make a shift-left mindset essential:
- Regulatory Pressure: Compliance with frameworks like PCI DSS, GDPR, SOX, and local banking laws is non-negotiable. Embedding compliance checks early reduces risk of non-compliance penalties.
- Security-First Banking: With rising cyberattacks and fraud attempts, financial systems must be secure by design, not as an afterthought.
- Customer Expectations: Consumers expect real-time payments, seamless onboarding, and personalized services. Delay in innovation means lost customers.
- Complex Ecosystems: Banks, insurers, and payment providers operate with a mix of legacy systems, modern cloud services, and FinTech integrations making governance and interoperability crucial.
A Shift-Left Architecture addresses these challenges by ensuring systems are compliant, secure, and reliable at every stage of development.
feat. Zilla: One Stop Solution
Zilla is a multi-protocol edge and service proxy built to streamline, secure, and manage event-driven architectures (EDAs) with scalability and performance at its core.
Zilla uses this simplified mapping approach to support HTTP, Server-Sent Events, gRPC and MQTT entry points to and from Kafka, such that the client can remain unaware that Kafka is present in the application architecture behind Zilla.
Zilla Plus
With Zilla Plus, users gain native kafka proxy with out-of-the-box data quality enforcement, along with advanced capabilities such as Virtual Clusters, secure public and private access, and more.
Data Governance
Zilla enables centralized schema management and data validation across multiple protocols like HTTP, MQTT, and Kafka.
Zilla offers a seamless way to ensure that data is validated and encoded as per standard if required before it reaches its destination, regardless of the protocol in use.
With this powerful configuration, Zilla empowers you to manage, validate, and transform data across distributed systems effortlessly, ensuring both flexibility and data consistency.
Security
TLS
Zilla secures financial data flows across all supported protocols with TLS encryption, ensuring that sensitive data such as transactions, account details, and customer information cannot be intercepted or tampered with in transit.
By binding TLS at the edge, Zilla eliminates man-in-the-middle vulnerabilities and enforces end-to-end encryption, which is critical for meeting FinServ-grade security expectations.
JWT
Zilla supports JWT-based access control, allowing authentication and fine-grained authorization.
Access tokens can carry detailed privileges, enabling institutions to enforce rules such as which clients can publish or subscribe to payment streams, access customer data, or trigger compliance workflows.
Enterprise Integration
Zilla Plus extends authentication and authorization with support for:
- Azure AD: Enabling seamless integration with Microsoft Entra ID(Azure AD) identity and access management.
- AWS Lambda: Enforcing custom authorization logic as part of the access control flow.
A global financial services platform must align with diverse and evolving regulatory frameworks across regions. This requires event-driven infrastructure that is not only scalable but also adaptable to jurisdiction-specific compliance demands.
This is where Zilla fits in:
Deploy Anywhere
Run Zilla in public cloud, private cloud, on-premises, or at the edge to align with data residency and compliance mandates.
Stateless by Design
Zilla’s stateless architecture allows redeployment or migration without the complexity of internal state management, ensuring business continuity.
Regulatory Agility
With flexible deployment and governance capabilities, Zilla ensures your platform can rapidly adapt to regulatory change without operational friction.
Near-Zero Latency Tax
Zilla minimizes the latency tax traditionally associated with proxies.
Built on a stateless, stream-based architecture, Zilla delivers minimal overhead while supporting Kafka, MQTT, gRPC, HTTP, and SSE with the same high-performance, enterprise-grade efficiency.
API Specifications Support
Financial ecosystems rely heavily on open standards like OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, and gRPC.
Zilla natively supports these specifications, allowing institutions to publish, manage, and govern APIs consistently across protocols.
Developers and architects can design APIs once and let Zilla enforce consistency, security, and performance at runtime.
Use-Cases of Data Collaboration in FinServ
Data collaboration is becoming the backbone of innovation in financial services. Instead of treating data as an internal asset locked inside organizational boundaries, leading firms are building ecosystems where data can be shared, enriched, and governed across multiple parties.
Open Banking connections with real-time data access
Open Banking is transforming how financial institutions engage with customers and partners. Regulations like PSD2 in Europe and Open Banking initiatives in the UK, Australia, and beyond are mandating secure, API-based data sharing.
Real-Time fraud prevention across payment networks
Fraud is one of the highest-stakes challenges in FinServ. With instant payments, mobile wallets, and cross-border transfers, the attack surface has expanded dramatically. Legacy fraud detection systems based on batch analysis or manual reviews are no longer sufficient.
Demo: Zilla in action
To help you experience these capabilities in action, we’ve built Streampay, a web-based payments app that showcases how Zilla works with Kafka and Vue.js.
Streampay lets users request and send money in real time, demonstrating how event-driven architectures powered by Zilla can deliver secure, low-latency financial transactions at scale.
Try Streampay Demo and see Zilla in action for modern FinServ applications.
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Transactions
Streampay homepage displays a live feed of simulated payment activity driven by real & virtual users. From here, you can request a payment or send money to another user.
AsyncAPI Specs
- HTTP Spec: Defines RESTful endpoints and SSE channels.
- Kafka Spec: Specifies Kafka topics for publishing and consuming.
Conclusion
Financial services are undergoing a once-in-a-generation transformation where real-time governed data products are becoming the new competitive advantage.
Firms that treat event streams as custom-builds rather than governed products will fall behind on customer expectations, regulatory readiness, and innovation speed.
Aklivity Zilla provides the foundation to move forward with confidence. With multi-protocol support, near-zero latency, built-in data governance, and regulatory agility, Zilla enables financial organizations to innovate faster, stop fraud in real time, and deliver secure, seamless customer experiences.
What’s Next?
We have many such demos and real-world examples published in mentioned Git repositories for you to explore.
Zilla Examples: Hands-on guides and configurations for real world use cases.
Zilla Demos: End-to-end demonstrations of Zilla powering real-time systems.
Join the Zilla Community! Share your experiences and questions on Slack.
