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Midas: Helping People Reach Financial Health Through 100% Data AccuracyAbout - Midas Midas is an intelligent personal financial assistant app built for the needs of Indonesians. They aim to help users reach their savings aspirations with easy access to their financial health at their fingertips. Background Midas started as a simple idea to provide a summary overview of users’ spending habits. However, as they built out product features, it became apparent that many parts needed to be automated. Extracting data from users’ banking accounts is at the top of their list. As you can imagine, integrating with financial services requires some sophisticated integration skills. The Midas team attempted to try their hands at doing it themselves but found themselves with one roadblock after another. He recounted, “We needed to go through a long process, paperwork and finally, the technical aspect of getting an integration to work with one bank. It was a painful and stressful period for us.” Challenge Building and maintaining API access While going through legacy paperwork was lengthy, the steps were relatively easy to understand. However, this is not the case with technical documentation. The engineers had to hunt through the writings and figure things out as they moved along. “Our engineers can get the integration up eventually, but the journey towards that was not pleasant. It is not their core skillset, so everyone is visibly frustrated,” Kevin shared. Adding fuel to the fire is the maintenance process. When there are changes on the bank’s side of the integration, Midas will have to update it on their end. Often, it’s a tedious debugging process. Time-consuming process As a result, it took them a long time to achieve a lacklustre connection between just two banks. Wasting precious time, the team missed out on building more functionalities. Needless to say, they were lagging behind deadlines as well. Kevin felt the team was missing out on putting the time to good use, improving analytics algorithms and spending time with new features instead. He commented, “We did not want to be in this situation, but it was a necessary pain we had to put up with. It is not our core competency, and we don’t intend it to be because we did not have any choices back then”. That was when Brick got their attention. After a thorough discussion in the demo session, Kevin recall going back to the team and telling them: “Guys, I found the solution to our data integration problem!” Solution Ready-made data integration What caught Kevin’s attention was a ready-made solution that could be easily implemented. There was no fumbling around with vast sections of codes. The clean documentation of codings and steps also impressed the Midas team. He explained, “Our developers were delighted to see the process laid out in detail from the documents Brick sent over. As a result, rolling out the integration was relatively streamlined and stress-free.” Quick deployment, high reliability The whole deployment consists of two parts. First, it was putting it in a sandbox environment, which started within the week. “It was great that they responded quickly, and I appreciate that very much. We got everything set up and running in a short time. Brick’s technical team was with us all way.” It was quickly transferred to the live server when the implementation and adjustments were finalised. Post-launch, Brick remains remarkably easy to maintain. “For a start, the data we’ve got from them has 100% accuracy. They are quick with call requests, and we have never experienced downtime. It’s impressive,” Kevin shared. Stellar support For Kevin, what stood out most was Brick’s support to their customers. A Whatsapp group chat with technical teams from both sides was created, serving as their main communication base. He recounted, “The support team was always replying to our messages quickly. Once we messaged them late into the night, we were surprised to get a response. You know how sometimes, when you become a customer, the support drops because you’re no longer ‘new’ - that is not the case with Brick. The consistency of their prompt support from the beginning is something you don’t often get nowadays.” It is not only the support team that is there for them either. For example, Kevin remember an instance when he needed some additional support and advice regarding government licensing. He reached out to Brick’s management team and got the assistance he was looking for and more. “They’re a very founder-friendly organisation. On top of extending a helping hand to us, Brick invited us to a few of their networking sessions for us to gain more experience and exposure! We are thankful for their kind gesture.” Kevin shared. Results 3x more efficient With Brick, Midas estimate they saved 70% of the time they would have spent to build integrations to the current number of banks. Within that same timeframe, they are now connected with six banks, working out to be three times more efficient use of time. “Our engineers are, without a doubt, more efficient now. But more importantly, we have handed over all the worrying about building, maintaining and debugging the connections to Brick. It used to take up a big chunk of our time, and the problem is now gone. That, to us, is a huge relief.” he said. Capital efficiency Kevin also shared that if he were to compare human costs associated with building the data pipeline themselves with using the Data API from brick, it would be quite an amount of cost savings. “I reckon that we saved money by using Brick. For what we pay in salary to our engineers, it’s not worth asking them to spend time on something not within their core skillset. We can truly get them to work on the analytics and features side of the product, which is what all of us are more interested in. They are happier and more motivated as a result too!” The best part about Brick? They let you go back to doing what you do best. Kevin believes that Brick’s approach enables Fintech companies to go back to their core competencies and do what they do best. He concludes: “Brick is a true enabler. I love that they’ve allowed us to free up time to solve the problems we set out to solve. The team is hyperfocus, knowing they will always have up-to-date technological implementation and don’t have to deal with the complex extraction process.” ***
