The increased appetite for digital lending and credit solutions has led to an explosion in financial software, algorithms, and applications. Cutting out the middle man, peer-to-peer (P2P) lending enables customers to apply directly to companies for finance, and get a quick decision on whether or not their request has been successful. Similarly, person-to-person lending works in the same way, with loans issued and received by individuals.
Here we describe the role of load balancers in supporting these peer-to-peer lending solutions.
User expectations of peer-to-peer money lending
Avoiding conventional financial institutions, peer-to-peer lending offers applicants quick, flexible funding, with the software application companies profiting by charging a small percentage of the loan sum.
User expectations however require that these applications offer the following features:
- They must be frictionless and easy to access at any time of day.
- Their data must be held securely.
- Profiles need to be easily accessed and updated.
- Bank details need to be effortlessly integrated, allowing lenders and borrowers to make and receive payments quickly.
- Real-time analytics to support user notifications and admin insights.
- Credit score checkers need to be integrated so users can remain in the application.
How load balancing enhances the delivery of these services
Whilst mobile banking app developers are continuously pushing boundaries and coming up with new functionality, the ability of the P2P application to remain available to users 24/7 requires load balancing to ensure its high availability.
Load balancers introduce massive scaling capabilities and provide smooth redundancy and failover if and when things go wrong. They take incoming requests and forward them to multiple back-end servers, helping to manage the requests much more efficiently and reducing strain on a single back-end server.
The load balancer has the capabilities to check if the back-end service is up, by running health checks. If one of the servers is "down", it will fail its health checks and no connections will hit that server, ensuring all connections hit a healthy "up" server. This ensures an uninterrupted user experience. You can also control which servers are taken offline with maintenance features, allowing you to take a server offline to perform maintenance such as updates.
Conclusion
Applications don't exist in a vacuum. The essential integration of a number of workflows outside these peer-to-peer applications requires an end-to-end approach to managing the traffic flowing through this software. It is only by ensuring the high availability of the entire data chain that the expectations of users can be adequately met.
If you're considering your options, you might find this blog exploring the best load balancing methods and algorithms useful. Or, as always, feel free to reach out to one of our experts.