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An expert software engineer reinforced digital banking and lending platforms, helping them improve data flow, resolve service issues quickly, and serve millions globally without breaking.
The global digital finance sector is growing at breakneck speed. By 2033, the market could reach $15.4 billion, Market.US predicts. This figure underscores the widespread adoption of digital financial services around the world. Today, workers, families, small businesses, and even students rely on such services to make transfers, pay bills, or borrow money. Beneath this surface, however, lies a bitter truth: the software powering these services is fragile. If it breaks, it can turn everything on its head. Payments fail. Loans are approved late. Credit scores are miscalculated. Service requests are delayed. Data becomes corrupted. These issues often do not make headlines, but they significantly impact the daily lives of users.
In the course of his career, Arbaz Surti, a software development engineer in test at Boston Data Pro LLC, has tackled such challenges facing users worldwide by building resilience into the digital financial services they depend on every day. Arbaz obtained his bachelor’s degree in electronics and telecommunication at the University of Mumbai, India. Thereafter, he worked as a business analyst at CRMNEXT, Mumbai, where he helped it build a complete customer relationship management (CRM) solution for the State Bank of India (SBI), the largest public bank in the country, significantly reducing service request time for millions. Later on, he left the job to pursue a master’s degree in management information systems at Texas A&M University, USA, where he was taught resilience: it took him about 10 months to cold-email more than 1,000 applications before landing his first job at LendingTree. As a product manager at the company, he led the student loans vertical to streamline data across multiple lending partners, saving hours of engineering time monthly. Yet, he was laid off in 2023 due to market shifts, but he secured his next job at Boston Data Pro LLC within 55 days of a 60-day grace period. Now working as a product analyst (quality assurance) for Inspire Brands, a major client of Boston Data Pro LLC, he ensured that the company’s portal upgrade had no disruption for millions of its customers worldwide.
So far, Arbaz’s efforts have not gone unnoticed. He is a senior IEEE member and the current chair of the IEEE Consumer Technology Society (CTS), Boston Section. This reflects his deep expertise in engineering and leveraging cutting-edge technologies to research, build, and deploy consumer products for the benefit of society. As the digital finance market continues to grow worldwide, India can learn from his experience and build resilient systems that can support its ever-expanding digital financial services.
A very big challenge in digital finance is that data usually flows across different institutions. This is worsened by the fact that banks, fintechs, and online marketplaces are all connected in digital finance. So, information from these institutions often does not match. For instance, some fields could be missing, formats could be incompatible, and codings could be different across the board. “These issues can affect financial outcomes negatively,” Arbaz says. “Any field containing errors can affect risk models. Also, a payload that is poorly structured can stop the flow of underwriting. In addition, misaligned data from one partner can deny loans for genuine applicants.” Arbaz witnessed these issues personally at LendingTree, an online lending marketplace serving users around the world. For a lasting solution, he standardised data flow in the company. To achieve this, he employed a three-pronged technical approach. He created a uniform file format specification that all eight lending partners would adopt for their data submissions. Then, he rebuilt the ingestion script to handle this standardised format while incorporating automated validation checks that rejected non-compliant files before warehouse entry. Finally, he integrated an email notification system that alerted stakeholders instantly when format discrepancies were detected, allowing issues to be caught and resolved before they could impact downstream analytics. The project saved engineering teams about 16 hours every month. That is the time they usually waste on cleaning up data manually. In addition, over 200,000 customers now enjoy better financial decisions.
Yet, workflow engines pose another difficult challenge in digital finance. This is because they are always slow, especially in large financial institutions. These software applications are often used to process updates for KYC and resolve service tickets. “Funnily enough, many banks still use old applications to handle these important tasks,” Arbaz notes. “This causes problems for customers who need to update their accounts, resolve issues, or ask questions about services.” Arbaz noticed these issues at CRMNEXT. So, he rebuilt the company’s workflow application that is used by banks and credit unions around the world. To do that, he added three important functions to the workflow engine of the company. First of all, he automated workflow processes, including a functionality that made each department handle service requests the same way. Then using API connectors and ETF pipelines, he brought together different systems from various departments. This ensured that all data moved to one central location, making it easy for everyone to access the same data. Finally, he set up a logic for routing service requests from customers based on the degrees of urgency of such requests. With this, available customer service agents could see urgent requests first, helping resolve very important issues quickly. This reduced response times by 25%. Also, over 200 million users worldwide began to enjoy faster services.
Moreover, digital financial platforms can crash when many people access different services at the same time. In most cases, this can happen when digital banks and lenders are changing their interest rates, updating their products, or introducing several marketing campaigns simultaneously. It can also happen when a greater number of users want to borrow. “Any little error at such moments can cause huge damage,” Arbaz notes. “Transactions might stop going through, calculations might go wrong, or timeouts might delay services.” Arbaz protected both LendingTree and CRMNEXT from such breakdowns. To do that effectively, he singled out JMeter, a load testing tool, for the job. With JMeter, he tested the platforms to see what would happen to them if many people used them during peak times. After doing the tests, he was able to know the exact point where each platform would crash. With this data, he worked with engineering teams to make things better. Together, they made response times for APIs faster, tuned database connection pools, and made the capacity of the platforms to increase as more people used them. To ensure that everything worked fine, they tested these measures under heavy loads. Now, these platforms are stronger. Also, they will not crash even if millions of people are using them during peak seasons.
From the foregoing, it is very clear that the use of digital financial services is ballooning across the globe. As a result, there is an urgent need to protect the systems processing these transactions from failing. Otherwise, the ripple effects would be felt the world over. In the course of his decade-old career, Arbaz Surti has been working hard to ensure that such a fate does not befall Indians and others around the world. At LendingTree and CRMNEXT, he helped more than 200,000 customers get better financial outcomes, reduced response times drastically, and allowed the platforms to continue working, even while under heavy pressure. His career, therefore, illustrates the fact that the future of digital finance lies in the strength of the systems supporting it.
