Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure

https://www.juxt.pro/blog/clojure-in-griffin/

by coder94 • 3 years ago

402 218 3 years ago

I see. So this helps you build a Neobank or something like that. It's Mambu for the UK?

teamspirit• 3 years ago

Why are these API banks always in the UK? I've been waiting to do my banking using curl for years and no one has made it available in the US.

edent• 3 years ago

In part because of the "Regulatory Sandbox" - https://www.fca.org.uk/firms/innovation/regulatory-sandbox

venantius6• 3 years ago

Actually, no - the regulatory sandbox cannot be used by prospective banks.

tazjin• 3 years ago

It's fairly common in Russia, too. Mostly because some "challenger banks" forced everyone else to modernise.

ctdean• 3 years ago

Getting a new banking charter in the US is hard, but it's straightforward to be a challenger bank in the UK. Jarvis moved (back) to London from SF to start Griffin.

The banks in the US that have APIs tend to focus on large fintech partnerships, so even simple APIs will be expensive compared to a regular bank account. Grasshopper Bank in the US (for example) is one of the few that will do APIs on top of regular commercial bank accounts.

(I work at Treasury Prime, which powers many US banks that do APIs.)

venantius6• 3 years ago

It’s hard in the UK too! Just not “infeasible” hard. (Plus, it’s easier to finance as you don’t have those pesky Bank Holding Company Act regs dinging your investors)

ensignavenger2• 3 years ago

I see new banks popping up all the time in the US. I would enjoy seeing a comparison of the process in the US vs the UK.

downWidOutaFite2• 3 years ago

UK has government mandated API requirements for banks. In the USA it's left to the "free market" which in practice means having to trust unreliable 3rd parties like Yodlee or Plaid.

matt32103• 3 years ago

Lol plaid wanted my username and password for access to my bank for a third party. No way

vermilingua• 3 years ago

Does anyone know why this is the case in Australia too? Is there a regulatory reason or is it just a matter of market size?

ungamedplayer• 3 years ago

Iirc nab has an API

orra2• 3 years ago

Why are these API banks always in the UK?

I can think of 835 million reasons: https://www.reuters.com/article/eu-rbs-britain/corrected-uk-...

Plus, Open Banking and Faster Payments (which were EU initiatives before Brexit) maybe helped.

blibble6• 3 years ago

faster payments had nothing to do with the EU

"open" banking did (and accordingly you have to be a large company to participate at all)

avianlyric3• 3 years ago

U.S. banking is surprisingly far behind the curve, and hasn’t led the world from a tech or innovation perspective for many decades.

The UK on the other hand has actively encouraged new banks and new tech. It’s had things like instant, free, payments between personal accounts for almost two decades. Contactless transactions for at least a decade, mobile banking for decades, and government mandated banking API for almost 5 years.

In short, the UK has a very active banking sector that’s been rapidly (for banks) innovating for many decades. So the environment and ecosystem are well developed for further and faster innovation.

In the U.S., it seems banks gave up on tech innovation decades ago, and decided that innovation in fees and punitive treatment of customers was their preferred approach. As a result there just isn’t an environment for new innovation, the incumbents find it much easier to crush competition, rather than compete. Why the same isn’t true in UK (which until recently had remarkably few distinct banks), is probably down to the nature of law and regulation, which gives customers lots of rights, and actively punishes banks that don’t uphold them.

scarby2• 3 years ago

It’s had things like instant, free, payments between personal accounts for almost two decades.

Thanks for making me feel old I was thinking "it hasn't been anywhere near that long, I remember the rollout like it was yesterday". Turns out that rollout was 15 years ago.

BurningFrog• 3 years ago

US banks are very tightly regulated, and the regulators haven't ordered these inventions yet.

8fingerlouie• 3 years ago

The UK on the other hand has actively encouraged new banks and new tech. It’s had things like instant, free, payments between personal accounts for almost two decades. Contactless transactions for at least a decade, mobile banking for decades, and government mandated banking API for almost 5 years.

I think most of those things are EU initiatives, which the UK was a member of at the time.

At least we have all of them in Denmark as well.

decentsafety• 3 years ago

Not sure if anyone else can comment on prevalent software in banking. But it seems like IBM’s FTM is fairly prevalent. The underlying technology from a glance seems dated (Java 8, bunch of uncontainerized shell scripts running the show) and highly proprietary in the bad ways. E.g the proprietary stack hasn’t seen innovation. Add to that, the same teams deploying this software.

matt32103• 3 years ago

Yes! I need an api bank for personal use too!!

seabass-labrax6• 3 years ago

After the financial crash of 2008 and the subsequent succession of banking scandals, in which the taxpayer bailed out multiple prominent banks, the UK's government at the time introduced a series of measures to promote smaller banks. For individual personal accounts, Monzo and Starling are probably the most well-known of these so-called 'challenger banks'[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenger_bank

harel2• 3 years ago

Further more, banks that were bailed out signed a deal to actively help those smaller banks by transitioning clients to them. I know that because my bank offered me a few times to the point of nagging to switch my business accounts from them to one of the smaller ones. They offered to pay me a sum of a few thousand pounds to do that. I declined at the time due to me liking my bank and appreciating one app for all my business and personal accounts. When I pushed why are they willing to pay me large sums to leave them, the told me the above.

rkeene23• 3 years ago

Hi. My company, Keeta [0], is making this available in many countries, including the US.

[0] https://keeta.com/

j16sdiz3• 3 years ago

It's not. Doing payment or wire transfer is not same as being a bank in most country, even to the customers

nwatson• 3 years ago

The UK is friendly to money-laundering, presenting the more respectable faces of an international network of questionable banks and financial institutions. API banking will allow a faster cycle of wash, rinse, repeat, an innovation in shady.

seabass-labrax6• 3 years ago

We shouldn't avoid making finance easier and more efficient simply because it might make criminals more effective by the same ratio!

jwr3• 3 years ago

The US banking world seems to be firmly stuck in the 80s and banks need to be dragged kicking and screaming to implement anything recent, so this doesn't surprise me at all.

hbcondo714• 3 years ago

Now there's https://column.com as discussed here last year:

Column – a chartered bank for developers

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31109170

richardw• 3 years ago

67m people in UK in a far more homogenous market. US is a lot more complicated, has a lot more legacy and more parties to get anything done.

See e.g. the sluggish move to chip and pin, sluggish death of checks, slow move to real-time payments. Hard to turn a supertanker with many states and thousands of banks.

yuumei• 3 years ago

Unfortunately in the UK a bank can (and do) freeze your account with no reason for up to 2 years without any recourse or access to funds. With API access you risk your money being frozen due to automatic fraud detection. The government have given up policing of finance to banks and they take the least risky options

fabianhjr• 3 years ago

And in the US they got civil forfiture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...

To get back the seized property, owners must prove it was not involved in criminal activity.

Some cases:

https://ij.org/report/policing-for-profit-2/grading-state-fe...

https://prosperityeconomics.org/stolen-savings-civil-forfeit...

dataangel2• 3 years ago

In 2015, Eric Holder ended the policy of "adoptive forfeiture", which occurred "when a state or local law enforcement agency seizes property pursuant to state law and requests that a federal agency take the seized asset and forfeit it under federal law" due to abuse.[21] Although states proceeded to curtail the powers of police to seize assets, actions by the Justice Department in July 2017 have sought to reinstate police seizure powers that simultaneously raise funding for federal agencies and local law enforcement.[22]

basically Obama got rid of it then Trump put it back then Biden didn't anything

downWidOutaFite2• 3 years ago

Your first link says the IRS stopped doing forfeiture of bank accounts 9 years ago.

varispeed5• 3 years ago

These "challenger" banks are a gimmick. Friend of mine recently tried to set up an account for his new business and all "challengers" refused a business account, they were slow to respond and disinterested in helping. Eventually he set up with a high street bank, but the whole thing took over a month, which is ridiculous.

toyg• 3 years ago

That's surprising. Starling opened a business account for me in less than 3 days. This was back in 2018 though.

monooso• 3 years ago

My experience of banking with both Starling and Monzo (personal and business) has been excellent. Far better than with any of the high street banks.

blitzar2• 3 years ago

Exact same experience, I wouldnt say refused just hoop after hoop to jump through. disinterested in helping is an apt description, they got interested 2 years later and I would get a daily phone call about "finishing my application".

I was pretty transparent with the person(s) calling - after years of doing their best to push business customers away, someone up high decided to make to get as many business customers as possible and everyone was on a fat commission to open up new accounts (I think lure of government guaranteed covid loans might have had something to do with it).

High street bank was open within 3 days, fill out the form and done.

yakshaving_jgt7• 3 years ago

That wasn't my experience.

I set up an account with HSBC about seven years go, and they were a nightmare. It took over a month to open the account, and everything had to be done in branch. Also, HSBC in the UK is not the same HSBC in other countries. I once had to fly back to London from Athens just to "pop in to my local branch" for some uninteresting bureaucratic process.

I closed that account and switched to Tide. It took me like 15 minutes to open the account online.

venantius6• 3 years ago

I wouldn’t say “given up” as much as “actively delegated”.

The UK has essentially made a (political) choice that rather than cover the cost of policing finance through taxes, they’ll just make the banks sort it out for them.

This is not great for some people for obvious reasons. But for everyone else it’s lower taxes. Where one falls on the political spectrum largely determines how one feels about this.

CTDOCodebases• 3 years ago

It’s part of the privatisation of the surveillance state.

Money isn’t the only motivation factor.

hanniabu5• 3 years ago

Yet another example for why Ethereum is needed

kemotep6• 3 years ago

Can you specifically describe how Ethereum, where all transactions are public, would prevent this kind of surveillance?

oldtownroad• 3 years ago

“By law, fintechs must work with a bank to do these things, and right now that means a legacy high street bank with mainframes. Griffin is the bank plus technology platform that all future fintechs would build on.”

Did they write this in 2016? The market has moved on. Griffin looks neat but they’re years behind many others, a nice API for banking exists from well established players, like ClearBank. There’s room for more so it’s great to see Griffin join the market but I hope their pitch isn’t this weak.

varispeed5• 3 years ago

that all future fintechs would build on

This also sounds awfully like a single point of failure and embodiment of what's wrong with late stage capitalism - where competition is an illusion.

ehhthing2• 3 years ago

I'm confused by this statement. fintechs aren't just proxies for banks, they're financial products that people want to use. There are plenty of cool and innovative things you can do with just a banking API beyond just creating another bank

Sure the costs for any fintech using these products are the same, but they can offer a million different types of products which make them unique.

venantius6• 3 years ago

There still isn’t a ton of choice in market - ClearBank is one of three other banks that actually have decent offerings. And having a good API is not enough; you need a holistic operating model that is aligned with your customer base, which is much harder to build for.

howmayiannoyyou• 3 years ago

Its not clear there will be small banks in the US to use this tech in the future. Here's why:

1. Deposit flight. Small banks are struggling to attract deposits at a time when money markets pay considerably more than deposit accounts.

2. Investment scarcity. Small banks are struggling to find places invest deposits where returns are safe, on a reporting adjusted basis. Meaning, small banks invest(ed) in US Treasuries, but as the Fed has rapidly hiked rates, the mark-to-market value of these investments has declined (though the funds are safe). The same can be said of new lending, which has similar problems due to credit risk, primarily in commercial real-estate.

3. Perceived risk. Rather than allow depositors to purchase additional FDIC insurance (above the $250k limit), which insurance would generate revenue for the FDIC and banks, the USGOV had done nothing. If you want to insurance excess deposits you must use an IntraFI account that spread deposits among different banks, and/or brokered CD's which does the same for that banking product. Both are higher friction, and both prevent instant access to funds - regardless of one's tolerance for penalties.

4. FISERV missteps. Small banks rely on Fiserv and a few other vendors to for back office and retail banking systems. In Fiserv's case their software is well behind big bank products that provide more features and easier user interfaces. Younger banking customers prefer big bank systems.

5. Regulatory overreach. Complex issue, but in sum its not clear bank regulators understand the banking business, or if they do, that they have any flexibility. By way of a few examples, its not clear to me regulators understand the safety & utility of brokered deposit use by small banks; the worthlessness of many bank capital asset appraisals, or the immense risk real-estate heavy loan portfolios are facing.

6. Asset-based lending death. Pre-2008 one could borrow against many types of capital assets, allowing businesses to purchase those assets with, say, 20% down. The asset secured the loan, with little or no reliance on personal guarantees or recent cash flow analysis. This practice led to problems in the 2008 GFC, but instead of tweaking the approach, lenders and regulators simply eliminated asset-based lending. When I write 'eliminated' I fully understand its still advertised as a lending product, but underwriting is reliant on cash flow, personal financial statements, and other factors that make 'asset based lending' a marketing term, not reality. This was profitable business for banks and didn't need to die.

More threats lie ahead for small banks in the US. Folks in the know speculate USGOV prefers the Canadian model, where most deposits are held by several big banks. It might be the case FedCoin opens new possibilities for small banks, reducing Fiserv and friends hold on small banking business. One can always hope.

arohner2• 3 years ago

We could in theory bank other banks, but that's not our focus. Our current customers are mostly regulated non-bank financial institutions, E-Money and Client money. As an American analogy, think Square Cash, Venmo, Paypal.

Longer term our aspiration is to also be the business bank for technology companies e.g. Apple or AirBnb or Uber. Currently Goldman is a big player in that space.

vichle• 3 years ago

Maybe I'm missing something, but it sounds like there's a strong case for Erlang/Elixir rather than Clojure? They kinda built BEAM on the JVM, no?

jsyolo• 3 years ago

They tried really hard to not use a distributed SQL database.

venantius6• 3 years ago

Because it’s not a great fit for an event driven architecture.

adampk2• 3 years ago

Yes it would be very hard to make a bad technology choice when you thought through the whole system

tadfisher• 3 years ago

As long as your balance is eventually consistent, what's the harm? ;)

lifty2• 3 years ago

They specifically mention why they went with FoundationDB, and that is because it's strictly serializable.

dataangel2• 3 years ago

nothing like having dynamic types manage your money

ilikehurdles• 3 years ago

While I also love to take part in cargo cults, you should probably fit some good blinders on before looking over at Nubank’s stack.

ilkhan42• 3 years ago

I wish people would stop bringing up Nubank when it comes to Clojure/FP as if it's some sort of mic drop that proves that it's the Right Way to develop financial software. When you have to keep bringing up the same example, it's not a very good argument.

bnert5• 3 years ago

In OO languages (Java, C#, C++, etc...), and functional ones (F#, Haskell, OCaml, etc...) types do not validate the correctness of logic, they evaluate the correctness of data structures and their access/mutation as they are manifested in the language.

OO languages consider data correctness as access patterns of encapsulated primitives (or other data structures) through defined behaviors on a "class".

Functional languages consider data correctness as access patterns which preserve previous version of data which a caller may still need to reference, or another part of the system references. Functional languages (in most cases) disallow direct mutation without some sort of immutability or persistence.

Types have little (or nothing) to do with program correctness, or data correctness as it relates to external storage engines and their concurrency guarantees (i.e. FoundationDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc...).

Therefore, in this scenario, what matter's most is the correctness of underlying storage (including the rigor of validating expected behavior) and the event sourcing/messaging systems, not on the internal data structures and their idioms conveyed by the language.

lmm5• 3 years ago

In OO languages (Java, C#, C++, etc...), and functional ones (F#, Haskell, OCaml, etc...) types do not validate the correctness of logic, they evaluate the correctness of data structures and their access/mutation as they are manifested in the language.

Nonsense. Types validate whatever you use them to validate, which can certainly include what we usually call "logic".

Types have little (or nothing) to do with program correctness

On the contrary, they're still the most effective technique we've found for improving program correctness at low cost.

waffletower3• 3 years ago

I would worry more about developers understanding JVM's numerics, personally. And there are also dragons in Clojure's numeric tower built atop it.

dgb23• 3 years ago

Clojure you can express arbitrary data constraints and pre/post conditions (design by contract), with spec or malli.

Clojure is also strongly typed, has (optional) type hints, which are understood by linting during dev time and helps the compiler to avoid reflection and boxing.

It’s a very robust language that people use for critical stuff.

xyst• 3 years ago

Despite the unpopularity here. I am still a fan of cryptocurrency as an alternative to traditional banking.

dsco• 3 years ago

Cryptocurrency is also even better than Clojure at being auditable as everything is on-chain all the time.

refset2• 3 years ago

If you're looking for something novel that combines crypto and ~Clojure, look no further: https://convex.world/

jokoon• 3 years ago

Unless finance institutions and laws can protect wallets and insure crypto, I will never use it. Currency is not just a number you move around, currency is deeply intertwined with how civilization works, and it requires a high amount of trust for people to use it.

Trust is rather a social concept that something you can really prove mathematically. It's collective trust. Unless you can DRASTICALLY reduce mis-use with bitcoin, no one with trust it ever without a lot of expensive protective measures.

A 1 hour lecture from a security professor on crypto currency:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9nv0Ol-R5Q

Something else:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AAUrMuMPlo

AnthonyMouse8• 3 years ago

I don't understand why this would be a serious impediment.

Suppose you go to an online exchange or Bitcoin ATM or local man with a crypto wallet, you hand over five $10 bills or transfer some money from your bank account, you get $50 in cryptocurrency.

Now you go to the adult bookstore's website and don't have to give them your name, you send $20 to your friend in a foreign country so she can get a cab to the airport without having to lose another $15+ to a wire transfer fee, or you just use it to pay for parking.

Even if you screw up entirely, the most you're out is $50. But then nobody is tying your literature preferences to your name, you can do your friend a favor more efficiently, and the credit card company doesn't have a database of where and when you park your car.

The trust issues come when you want to be a speculator holding a large amount of wealth in a form someone could steal by breaking into your computer, but what does that have to do with using ordinary amounts day to day as a currency?

_nhynes2• 3 years ago

With the introduction of CBDCs, FedNow, and platforms like TFA, it's starting to look like TradFi is getting the second-mover advantage. Cryptocurrency introduced programmable money, which is great, but it also came with other features like self-custody, extreme transparency & privacy, and immutability that have ended up being more than average users are willing to accept as a bundle.

TradFi entities now have the ability to pick what they like out of the mix and offer that to customers while also benefiting from the convenience of trust assumptions, something cryptocurrency eschews. TradFi is building atop thousands of years worth of UX improvements in how people can come to trust each other. It's difficult for cryptocurrency to compete there.

I still love the developer convenience of blockchain since it nicely combines serverless with auth with payments. But for the most part, given the existence of trust, these benefits could also come from a system like in TFA having a Wasm runtime and maybe a dash of WebAuthn. Like a mashup of Cloudflare Workers and Stripe.

hanniabu5• 3 years ago

You can build features like reversibility on top of Ethereum. A draconian government chain that solves none of the important grievances is not needed. I do not need big brother freezing my funds, deciding what I can and can't buy, etc.

blitzar2• 3 years ago

CBDCs, FedNow, and platforms like TFA, is getting the second-mover advantage

In the world outside the USA we had the features of these systems for decades before the bitcoin white paper was published.

epolanski• 3 years ago

The issue is always the same: traditional banking is frictionless, very cheap and convenient for 99.9% of people out there.

Crypto isn't frictionless, it's not cheap and it solves problems that only the 0.1% has such as the need of transferring large amounts of "money", without tracing, in short times, across the globe but it undoes the benefits that the 99.9% has while bringing complexity.

Plus, nobody really wants a deflationary currency, they don't work, the incentive is to hoard and hold, not spend, which is why even Bitcoin's website dropped the currency narrative for the store of value.

People don't buy Bitcoin to trade or pay, but to sell at a higher price. Exception being drug dealers and few lunatic anarcho-capitalists.

godon272• 3 years ago

I'm tired of hearing the "works on my machine" line about banks.

Here's a few issues I've run into in the last few years:

- I dissolved a corporation in Korea and it took nearly 1.5 years and $8k USD in lawyer fees to get ~$80k USD out of the country. My other option would've been to go back to Korea and buy Rolexes.

- I moved to an Eastern European country and spent several weeks providing KYC/AML docs after attempting to send $30k from the US to a local bank account while my funds were in limbo. Ended up having to use ATMs to pay rent and other expenses.

- Bought a house in said Eastern European country and almost lost the deal because of several bank delays. Seller was pissed and had to involve lawyers to calm him down. Technically I should've had to pay extra because of the delays, because of the way real estate deals are structured in that country.

- I moved to Latin America and went to probably 6 car dealers who all told me that purchasing a car would take up to 2 months because of the KYC/AML process involved in wiring money from the US. I ended up going various ATMs 40 times over the course of several weeks, withdrawing $500 at a time, so I could buy a used car off Facebook marketplace. Had to take over $20k in cash in a backpack to a lawyer's office to complete the deal. Spent way more time & money on my rental car than I wanted to.

- Earlier this year while visiting the US I went into a bank branch to withdraw $20k to purchase a used car for my dad and not only could the teller not help me, but it triggered a flag on my account that caused all of my funds to be frozen for several days until I was able to get it resolved. Ended up borrowing money from a friend so I could buy the car before I left the US.

- Sending even $500 to my bank account here in Latin America takes over a week with various questions from bank staff. Every time I worry if the funds will even arrive because it has to go through multiple intermediaries with various memos/notes to the intermediary receivers. From my US bank account to another bank in NY, credited to some European account holder to send to Europe with further instructions on how to get the money to me in Latin America. I bank with an institution that's run by the national government; I figured they'd have better international finance connections than any of the commercial banks, but apparently not.

- A couple weeks ago I decided I'd send $50k to my account here because I don't want to go through this processes every time I want to pay bills. 2 weeks later and my $50k is still stuck. The bank keeps coming back with more questions and requesting more documents every few days. Nobody at the bank can tell me how long it will take to release the funds.

I've got more stories like this, and I know many expats with similar stories. I'm fortunate that I even have US financial access, and that I'm not living in a country like Lebanon, Turkey, Argentina, Venezuela, or even worse Russia, Iran, Cuba, etc. Things are even more difficult in many other countries.

By the way, Western Union works great here and is super fast, but they take huge commissions. Funny how that works.

The traditional financial system works great if you live in a first-world financial bubble and all of your friends, family, business partners, etc. also live in first-world financial bubbles. Meanwhile some of us are still on the financial equivalent of dial-up while the typical HN poster is on gigabit fiber talking about how great all of the bloated 20MB web apps are for them. I'm sweating bullets every time I deal with a bank, while people on HN say "this shit is great!"

I'll be beyond happy if the Bitcoiners are right and the whole world eventually switches to a global permissionless currency.

kiitos6• 3 years ago

I put 100k EUR of Bitcoin into a wallet, but then I lose the private key. There has to be a way for me to recover access to my funds. The only way to do that is to delegate trust to a central authority. Crypto will never, can never, be an alternative to traditional banking for the general population.

lifty2• 3 years ago

You're right, this is a massive weakness in the cryptocurrency space and until this gets better solutions I doubt there will be more mainstream adoption (without centralised custodians). But I will say that this isn't only a problem in the cryptocurrency space, it's a general problem for cryptographic systems. We need better generic systems for managed cryptographic keys, with several levels of backups and recovery options, with minimum hassle. ERC-4337 standard goes in the right direction.

weird-eye-issue5• 3 years ago

Why do people like you have to pop up and mention cryptocurrency on any thread related to finance?

I'm saying this as someone who first bought bitcoin back around 2010. It is just obnoxious and completely unrelated to the thread topic

fuddle• 3 years ago

It's pretty cool to see that the two founders wrote a book together: "Learning ClojureScript" https://www.packtpub.com/product/learning-clojurescript/9781...

mark_l_watson• 3 years ago

I see that the third author of the book was Allen Rohner. I worked with him at Compass Labs, an incredibly talented developer! He also founded CircleCI.

nathell• 3 years ago

and this additional proprietary thing that I really need to open source (I ported Datascript to FoundationDB).

Yes please! I wonder how that plays out as an alternative to Datomic.

gremlinsinc2• 3 years ago

the whole article read to me like a guide: How to over engineer a project for kicks and giggles.

adampk2• 3 years ago

It clearly explained what the design constraints were and why the technology choices met them

n426• 3 years ago

how would you under engineer your bank?

Lyngbakr• 3 years ago

James Trunk, who is now Griffin's VP of Engineering, gave one of the most clear and enjoyable technical introductions to Clojure I've seen. Recommended!

https://youtu.be/C-kF25fWTO8?si=PnjMNLdBLJ8zqSu-

phist_mcgee• 3 years ago

That was an incredible video, thanks!

gremlinsinc2• 3 years ago

I absolutely hate when an articles starts out with:

IN A STARTUP, YOU SHOULD BE USING THE MOST POWERFUL LANGUAGE YOU CAN, AND THAT IS CLOJURE.

says you. one opinion. in a startup you should use the language that your team can build and launch your MVP the fastest so you can get your first customers or funding. Hell, this could be a low code or no-code platform(probably not in fintech, just saying with startups in general).

I mean, I'd say Python is the most powerful language because of LLMs and machine learning and generally I'm a PHP dev. Python also is about to get a ton more powerful with mojo which supposedly makes Python 36000x more performant.

However, I would never tell someone x is the most powerful language and only one to use for a startup because that's a total lie and opinion.

seabass-labrax6• 3 years ago

That catchline makes a lot more sense when you consider that JUXT is the most prominent company specialising in Clojure aside from Nubank itself, and have their logo at the foot of pretty much any conference remotely touching on Clojure topics.

Clojure has a fairly insular community that overlaps with other lisps more than it does something more popular such as Python or PHP, so the cliché (admittedly, one with some truth in it) that Clojure is the most powerful language might be surprising to someone who doesn't use it. We Clojure developers are used to it though, and stating our presumed superiority is almost a greeting at this stage!

tacker20002• 3 years ago

yawn

I’ve seen a few other projects around here that boasted about using clojure because “we are the smartest and clojure is best and everything else is dogshit”

Doesnt make your insular group look inviting or synpathetic at all to be honest…

KingMob2• 3 years ago

stating our presumed superiority is almost a greeting at this stage!

I think you're joking, but as another person in the Clojure community, please don't do this for real. The community already has issues with feeling "elite".

jwr3• 3 years ago

Of course it's an opinion. Anytime somebody says something, it's his/her opinion.

My opinion, for example, is that I agree with his opinion :-) My solo-founder business would not have been possible without Clojure and ClojureScript, which is a testament to the "power" of this language. I consider it "powerful", because it lets a single developer write and maintain a complex app over the years. It gives me power.

yakshaving_jgt7• 3 years ago

My solo-founder business would not have been possible without Clojure and ClojureScript

…Really? Why?

waffletower3• 3 years ago

Python is very powerful indeed, especially in 2023. But for some reason I orchestrate my LLMs and diffusion models using Clojure. I also prefer to tame LLM output using Clojure. I still definitely write Python where it makes perfect sense.

Animats• 3 years ago

Well, not yet. "The training wheels come off when we complete an audit, raise some more money, and finish writing the code. That should be Q3 or Q4 this year."

davewritescode• 3 years ago

How does this compare with SoFi’s Galileo platform just in terms of feature set. The Galileo API is fairly rich so I’m wondering what’s different and potentially better.

matt32103• 3 years ago

For businesses only it seems. I’d love a bank for personal use that was API accessible…

twodave• 3 years ago

Ah, Clojure, native tongue of the devil himself.

elwell• 3 years ago

Lol, what?

SeanAnderson• 3 years ago

It's sort of difficult for me to envision what possibilities would be available to me with this tool.

What user benefits are unlocked with seamless API access to a bank? Is it "just" something like Mint, but implemented in a more technically legit way?

seabass-labrax6• 3 years ago

If you have access to an API to process BACS transfers, you might be able to avoid having to pay percentage VISA or MasterCard fees. For any non-trivial sums of money, Griffin's fixed-rate pricing is rather competitive. The only real downside of transfers at the moment is needing the human in the loop, whereas card payments have already had fully automated platforms such as PayPal, Stripe and Opayo for many years.

venantius6• 3 years ago

Our customers are other Fintech companies rather than normal humans :)

kiitos6• 3 years ago

The problem right now is that there’s no way to control the behavior of the underlying Java threading libraries, nio, and writing to disk.

Nor will there ever be, just by the nature of those systems.

You can't get deterministic execution from a system that uses non-deterministic request ordering, task scheduling, etc. -- which is what you get if you always use multiple OS threads, or spawn multiple discrete processes in tests, and so on.

I mean, I guess you _can_ make that stuff deterministic, but it would require you to build synchronization points into every transition in your application state machines, in a way that would be controllable by tests, which is a very tall order!

In practice, the only way to do this kind of thing is to design the core of your system to be fully synchronous, and to make it concurrent by adding concurrency at higher layers, expressed at run-time.

dustingetz2• 3 years ago

never say never, i think maybe can be done with modifications to missionary, a structured concurrency dsl implementing process supervision for clojure/script. we already instrument missionary flows for testing missionary itself (asserting its state transitions)

j16sdiz3• 3 years ago

well.. that is just a fancy way to insert synchronisation point.

we useful, but not something limit breaking

kiitos6• 3 years ago

I guess you're suggesting that you can build an abstraction layer (I guess you're calling it missionary) which (a) can reliably intermediate every interaction between a user program and any potentially non-deterministic API, and (b) can be configured at runtime as synchronous/serial/deterministic or async/concurrent/non-deterministic. Is this accurate? (If so, I'm pretty confident that this is infeasible.)

arohner2• 3 years ago

It is a tall order, but but it's doable. The most important thing is to reduce the surface area of your application. Our business logic is almost entirely pure. The 'procs' have no side effects, except for things that happen on the other side of a clojure protocol (java interface). That means all side effects can be stubbed out during tests.

Our "user" code has no access to threading libraries. Threading happens in "kernel" code.

Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fFDFbi3toc for a good example of how this has already been done in practice.

kiitos6• 3 years ago

AFAICT you're describing exactly what I mean when I say a fully synchronous system.

ano88888• 3 years ago

which is a better or more productive language? Clojure or Elixir for web development?

devgoth• 3 years ago

I would argue that Elixir is due to Phoenix being a "batteries included" web framework....but as always: use the right tool for the job.

refset2• 3 years ago

Not disagreeing, and it's only one aspect of Phoenix, but it might be of interest to someone reading that this LiveView-like Clojure library exists: https://github.com/tatut/ripley

Also this is a neat list of LiveView-like technologies across various languages: https://github.com/liveviews/liveviews

tacker20002• 3 years ago

What does “batteries-included” mean? Except more buzzwords?

hestefisk• 3 years ago

Cool they are doing this. How do you plan to make money on the deposit rates you have to pay to attract cash? Will you do lending via API as well?

sroussey• 3 years ago

Is this helping win customers?

victorbjorklund• 3 years ago

It win over all the worlds 50 clojure devs for sure ;)

yakshaving_jgt7• 3 years ago

Imagine being fascinated by a JVM stack trace instead of frustrated that your online banking services are partially unavailable because of a software error.

weird-eye-issue5• 3 years ago

"We kind of joke that we’re a tech company that happens to have a banking license."

This is one of those quotes that can look really bad in hindsight if something goes wrong

BillyTheKing• 3 years ago

yea one of the things I've learned at Fintechs - all that Cobol code banks run on.. yes it's from the past and hard to maintain but it contains quite a bit of invaluable knowledge that you're bound to relearn if you rebuild.. And relearning in banking can be very expensive

tmpX7dMeXU• 3 years ago

I wouldn’t use a bank with this attitude. With a “tech company” label comes a lot of unjustified hubris based on an assumption that one is good at everything just because they write code.

My employer called themselves an education research company that happened to use software to commercialise their findings. It sat a lot better with me and made for better culture in my eyes.

donatj• 3 years ago

I have been using Wells Fargo for almost thirty years and while I don’t know if it’s still the case, as recent as four years ago their passwords were case insensitive. I’ll take a little sane fintech in my banking please.

hknmtt2• 3 years ago

Is there EU alternative? I mean bank that has API that looks like it was made in the 21st century? Except Wise and Revolut.

n41r0j• 3 years ago

In the Netherlands there is bunq, with a proper API just like Griffin is implementing right now. Been around for years!

hknmtt2• 3 years ago

that's not for me. something else?

maxehmookau• 3 years ago

Interesting idea. This was the sales pitch that drew me to Mondo (now Monzo) but they ended up dropping their user-facing API almost entirely and replaced it with Open Banking APIs that aren't available to regular hobbyists.

That said, looks interesting! Good luck!

yladiz2• 3 years ago

Serious question, and I apologize for the strong language: why should I give a shit about the language a service I consume is written in? Why does it matter it’s in Clojure? I am professionally a Clojure dev so it’s cool to see something written in Clojure like this, but why should I care about that?

This is one of the things I really dislike about the community. Yes, Clojure is a powerful language, and I really enjoy working with it, but I often feel that the community has some kind of imposter syndrome that drives the need to tell others and justify the use of the language in some project, and it’s weird.

acdha• 3 years ago

Typically it’s most important for languages which haven’t yet hit the level of acceptance that people still worry about being allowed to use them. I remember back in the 90s PHP and Python developers sharing examples like that because it answered business questions like “why aren’t we using Microsoft’s ASP?”

bmelton• 3 years ago

People think of Python as ubiquitous now, but forget how common it used to be for there to be articles titled things like "How to Convince Your Boss that Python is Good For Your Business" on HN and Slashdot back in the day

VikingCoder• 3 years ago

Perhaps you can send them code to execute server-side in a transaction? And so using their API means you have to develop in Clojure, too?

Or they're trying to attract developers to come work for them?

fnordsensei• 3 years ago

This is a blog post by one Clojure company, interviewing another Clojure company, with a tech stack focus. It’s not unusual within any language stack to have these kinds of blog posts - they’re obviously by and for people who find the technology interesting.

I don’t get your point. Is this somehow not appropriate behavior amongst civilized society?

Your remark comes across as not a little bit ignorant. Maybe you should just learn that if you “don’t give a shit”, you also don’t have to engage, and let the author write whatever they want.

yladiz2• 3 years ago

I think you misunderstand my point. I will admit that it was vitriolic, somewhat intentionally so, and conflated my general annoyance at posts that seem to virtue signal about the language they're using for their product, and this happening specifically in the Clojure community, but my point is not that it's inappropriate and I don't think I come across as ignorant here and so I disagree with that characterization. I also don't think it's fair to say I should just, paraphrasing, "sit down and shut up" if I have some criticism, because, taken further, it's a way to just dismiss criticism as negative even if it is constructive.

To be clearer, my point is two fold:

1. Why should I care about the language that a specific service is written in, be it Clojure, Rust, TypeScript, etc.? As a language user it's cool, but as a buyer (which, of course is not the target audience of this blog post) I don't think it matters the language as long as the product works well. For a bank, I couldn't care less if it's written in COBOL, Java, JavaScript, Piet, as long as my money is safe and transactions are handled correctly. 2. It feels like there are a lot of Clojure posts that go into the territory of putting Clojure on a pedestal, making it out to be the best language, etc. when in reality it is a tool, which excels at a lot of good tasks, but not every task, and while I may be biased it sometimes feels like the community needs to justify the existence of the language, that there's some kind of imposter syndrome. Maybe I would be less annoyed about this if I saw many/any posts about the pitfalls and difficulties of using Clojure.

the_optimist• 3 years ago

Looking for informed comments on FoundationDB datascript API. Is this identical to “distributed Datomic”? Does this maintain “time travel” capability?

rkhacker• 3 years ago

If you had a database and some separate messaging like ZeroMQ, Rabbit, Kafka, you’re going to get race conditions. There’s always going to be a potential race where you have two messages - one is going to the disk and one is going to the network. If someone else is listening and sees both of them, they could potentially get them in either order. So it’s much, much simpler to just have one path. Foundation is really fast, so it works great.

Having difficulty parsing this justification. How will a client code listening to an event get two events - one from network, and one from disk in case of any of the queuing systems mentioned here? I am also curious to know how the FoundationDB act like a messaging system apart more than a message store?

n426• 3 years ago

I think he's talking about how with FoundationDB, pub/sub notifications ("watches") are transactional – the notification is only sent if the transaction succeeds. because FoundationDB can guarantee transactions across multiple key writes, you can write your state at the same time you write an event/message/job somewhere else, in one transaction, with the subscriber only being notified on success. I think this is impossible(?) to achieve without the message queue and data store being the same service.

otherwise, you have a transaction to write to your database and a separate call to the message queue, which introduces the race condition.

https://apple.github.io/foundationdb/features.html#watches

kozzz• 3 years ago

Every time I see ZeroMQ being placed alongside RabbitMQ or Kafka as an example of a message queue system, it makes me wonder if the person who wrote that really knows what they are talking about. If they would rtfm they’d understand that ZeroMQ is more of a transport feature, that doesn’t really intersect with other mentioned projects in its features.

Improvotter• 3 years ago

I've always been interested in these fintech APIs but wonder what competitive advantages the companies that build on this have compared to one another. What differentiates a company building on this from another company building on the same API? It seems like the execution would differentiate them the most? I feel like I am missing something here. Could someone enlighten me?

Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure

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