From startups to banking giants, Erlang and Elixir has been making a splash in fintech stacks for years. Finally, this year, we’ll dedicate an entire conference to the inspiring work done on the BEAM in fintech!

The need for software engineers to manage high-traffic, high-security systems makes adding Erlang or Elixir to a tech stack a no-brainer. Elixir compiles to Erlang and inherits all of its advantages, such as performance, stability, concurrency, scalability and fault-tolerance. 

At Code BEAM Lite NYC, there is a mix of advanced and beginner talks. The 10 talks cover how to architect, develop, test and deploy financial switches, payment gateways, blockchain and cryptocurrencies, banking systems, machine learning, stock, crypto, derivative and currency exchange, and open banking APIs. 

There will also be three-day in-depth training courses available, as well as shorter tutorials, as well as excellent networking opportunities throughout the day.

The full speaker line-up will be announced in the coming weeks, and registration opens on 16 July.

Erlang and Elixir have been adopted by many financial companies and start-ups over the past couple of years, there are many more besides those listed below.

 

POA Network

Public platform for smart contracts. An open Ethereum sidechain with Proof of Authority (PoA) consensus by independent validators.

Open, public, permissioned network based on Ethereum protocol with Proof of Authority consensus, reached by independent pre-selected validators. 

POA products are for people who believe that the Ethereum protocol must be cheap, fast, and scalable. We are focusing on bringing the best developer experience for blockchain professionals. We promise that engaging with POA will help you create a first-class application on the platform.

Some of their recent work in Elixir:

• Blockscout - the first ever full featured open-source blockchain explorer for the Ethereum ecosystem, built in Elixir. 
• Mana client - POA partnered with ConsenSys and Compound Finance to collaborate on an Elixir based open-source Ethereum client — Mana.

 

Aeternity

æternity is a new blockchain technology, designed to deliver unmatched efficiency, transparent governance and global scalability, built in Erlang. Aeternity have built the aeternity VM in Erlang, among other things. 

 

Goldman Sachs

Erlang is used by Goldman Sachs in part of its HF trading platform. The Goldman Sachs platform is a very low latency (microseconds) event-driven market data processing, strategy, and order submission engine. It runs trading algorithms with low latency requirements that are responsive to changes in the market conditions. Erlang is used as part of the real-time monitoring solution for this distributed trading system.

 

Brex

Brex is the first corporate card for startups, tech, and online brands, and depends on a system built in Elixir. As of June 2019, Brex had secured funding that put it at a $2.6 Billion valuation. 

 

Klarna

Klarna is your typical startup done good. Founded in 2005 in Stockholm, Sweden, Klarna provides e-commerce payment solutions for merchants and shoppers with an aim of making it easier for people to shop online. Today, Klarna is one of Europe’s largest banks and is providing payment solutions for 60 million consumers across 90,000 merchants in 14 countries. 

Klarna is built on a technology stack of tools such as Erlang, Scala, Clojure and Haskell, combined with a serverless architecture. 

 

ClubCollect

ClubCollect is a service for (sports) clubs and other organisations to make invoicing of club members a breeze. Invoicing, reminding, online payments: everything is processed via ClubCollect. Tens of thousands of club members have already made payments using their service.

Their small team of 15 programmers built in Ruby (+ Ruby on Rails) and Elixir (+Phoenix). 

 

solarisBank

solarisBank is a Berlin-based 200-person fintech company making waves at a pace rarely seen before in the financial industry. 

solarisBank offers Banking-As-a-Platform, something that can be compared to Amazon’s AWS for digital banking. In a nutshell, you can build your own bank using different ‘bricks’ provided by solarisBank. And it does this with Elixir.

 

Margo Bank

In banking, data rules. It must be traced, consolidated, monitored, verified and verified again. Banks cannot afford to lose any data or even to have the tiniest mistake in their operations. If they do, they risk losing peoples' trust and money. 

Banks use their data in two main ways:

• in real-time to handle transactions;
• in batch to respond to automatic and daily tasks like reporting, settlement or accountability.

The home of a bank's data, the Core Banking System (CBS), can be seen as the heart of a bank. The CBS is in charge of running all the processes and ensuring everything is in order and under control.

Additionally, data can quickly become massive. As a result, CBS must accept a large volume of data with top performance. A CBS must also be available at any time. Yes, this is the case for all systems, however it is particularly true in the banking world.

To address these constraints, Margo Bank made the choice to develop their CBS and all of their other backend applications in Elixir.

 

Aircloak

Aircloak offers banks instant analytics that comply with complex banking regulations. Their approach to anonymization is compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), irrespective of the type of data. This provides a dramatic reduction in turnaround time for new projects and increased ability to share data internally.

Aircloak helps the banking sector to

• Reduce time and cost to achieve compliance
• Open up rich and highly sensitive transactional datasets across business units and organisational borders
• Better understand the ever-evolving needs of the modern-day customer
• Remain competitive with the largely unregulated FinTech startups by developing new products tailored to their existing customers’ needs

Our aim is to empower companies to get the analytical benefits of their data, without leaking sensitive information.

The core part which allows us to do this lies in our anonymization algorithm. While most companies reach for naive masking of sensitive fields (such as first/last name, social security number, …), we fetch the raw data required by the query, evaluate the query ourselves, and then decide which results can we safely emit without leaking sensitive data. The details of the algorithm are published in this paper 63.

The implementation of our system has quite a lot of interesting technical challenges. Our backend, implemented completely in Elixir, is installed on client premises. The system itself is split into two components, called Air and Cloak.

 

Circle

Circle builds products that enable greater ease-of-use in online and in-person payments. They are using Elixir in their product's API.

Circle is a new kind of global financial services company. A platform for individuals, institutions and entrepreneurs to use, trade, invest and raise capital with open crypto technologies.

 

Nav

Nav was founded to have a meaningful impact on the lives of millions of small business owners by bringing efficiency and transparency to financial decision making. We are changing the way these business owners secure lending with our innovative technology and customer-centric approach. Nav do all of this using Elixir as their main technology. 

 

Eficiência Fiscal

Eficiência Fiscal is a Brazilian startup focused on tax automation. Although they have some other programming languages in their tech stack, Elixir is their main language. The team uses it to power everything from background jobs to our user-facing GraphQL API.

 

500 Startups

500 Startups is a venture capital firm on a mission to discover and back the world’s most talented entrepreneurs, help them create successful companies at scale, and build thriving global ecosystems. It is one of the most active venture capital firms in the world. They use Elixir in their tech stack. 

 

Taxfix

Taxfix is a well-funded tech startup in the heart of Berlin, whose mission is to make tax declarations easy! They believe that everybody, regardless of their income, deserves to get the maximum out of their tax returns. To do this, they want to provide everyone with a personalised tax accountant at their fingertips. Taxfix is built in Elixir. 

 

SumUp

Sumup is the leading mobile point-of-sale (mPOS) company in Europe.They are building the first-ever global card acceptance brand, small businesses in over 31 countries around the world rely on SumUp to get paid, all with the help of Elixir!

 

Exeq

Exeq is a different and new type of personal finance app. It’s not a budgeting app, so much as it’s a spending app.Exeq is building the next generation of financial tools for the consumer. They're backed by a number of reputable investors and you'd be joining during our seed stage.

Exeq are using Elixir and Phoenix for their entire data infrastructure, tooling, and API which will support billions of transactions! 

 

Planswell

Planswell is a team of really smart people working together to change the financial industry for the better. They started by building software with Elixir that uses proven principles of financial planning to calculate how to maintain the best possible standard of living throughout your life. Tens of thousands of Canadians have created plans with Planswell, and they’re focused on reaching as many people as possible.