Series Financial

Architecting and scaling Series Financial’s core identity and transaction services while levelling up their web experience

Website

https://seriesfi.com/

Platforms

Web
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Vercel

Platforms

Frontend Development
Backend Development
Architecture Design
Integrations

About Series Financial
Series is a financial services platform that provides a comprehensive suite of independent but seamlessly interconnected financial products to centralize and automate your entire finance stack.

Series is one of the fastest growing financial services platform in the USA. As a result of strong growth, need for scale, and an ever-growing product roadmap, Series approached Lazer to help with a number of initiatives, including building and scaling out core services as well as redeveloping their frontend.

OUR APPROACH

Brexton, Series CEO, and the Series team have been operating in stealth for quite a while and have taken a well-planned, thoughtful, secure approach to everything that they do. We knew that every area we assist the team with needed to be built for scale, efficiently, and in an intuitive manner.

1

Refactoring Series’ web experience and establishing proper patterns

One of the first areas of the Series product we sought out to improve upon was their web frontend. Immediately we focused on refactoring the frontend in React by properly adopting Next.js pages and routing, integrating RTK Query, and developing a component library that utilizes correct patterns. We documented the component library heavily with Storybook and leveraged Storybook’s test runner for coverage reports and interaction tests.

Image showing all of Series' verticals and two people discussing them

2

Migrating Series’ monolith architecture to a micro-service based, event-driven one

On the backend side, one of our first observations was Series’ reliance on a monolithic architecture which was making it difficult for them to scale services and areas of their product efficiently. As a result, we focused on developing a plan to shift everything to a micro-service based, event driven architecture, and have services be built out with these same patterns.

Ring of Series' microservices

3

Developing the core identity service and scaling the micro-service architecture with AWS

Series’ identity service was the first service we built that also utilized the new micro-service architecture. We led the development of the identity service which holds all users’ identity data and serves as the authentication layer to obtain access to backend services. We leveraged AWS’ API Gateway (with Lambda Authorizers), AWS Virtual Private Cloud, AWS CloudTrail, and more to build this micro-service and set the foundation for more services.

Graphic with lady smiling in foreground

4

Leading the development of Series’ transaction service

Focusing on micro-services, Series’ transaction service was another service we built, where early on, it acted as the source of truth for all transaction data on the platform and was relied upon by the entire organization. With this service, we paid special attention to scalability and performance to the dependence on it.

Payroll screenshot in foreground and people looking at screen in background

5

Leveraging Google Cloud for a secure web experience

To further create a stable, reliable web experience, we relied on Google Cloud. Specifically we leveraged Firebase Auth to authenticate all users on the platform and we leveraged Firebase Cloud Functions for a serverless framework.

Payments screenshot in foreground and lady smiling in background

6

Taking advantage of Vercel for efficient web hosting

Since the frontend stack relied heavily on React, Next.js and other frameworks that fit well with those, we leveraged Vercel as well to host the frontend efficiently.

Two people looking at laptop, with vercel logo in foreground

THE RESULT

Working with the Series team was a blast. In a fast moving environment with a product that solves so many challenges startups and enterprises face with the financial system is a thrill. We’re happy to have contributed to core pillars of the Series product through a refactored and scalable frontend, an identity service core to Series users, and a transaction service that will soon process more than $1B in volume. We’re excited to see Series grow and thrive.