Based in London, Monzo is a bank that lives on the smartphone and is built for the way modern customers live today. By solving their problems, treating them fairly and being totally transparent, Monzo believes it can transform the way people bank.

“We are building a full retail bank. What we are trying to be is become the best banking app in the world. This means that instead of showing you cramped indecipherable descriptors that you get from traditional banks, we actually show you the name of the merchant along with the logo and a real-time balance rather than something that’s often delayed by 24 to 48-hours. Basically, we strive to make everything as clear and easy to understand for customers,” says Oliver Beattie, Head of Engineering, Monzo.

In their quest for building the best banking application, Kubernetes is significantly helping Monzo overcome core banking challenges and continuously innovate.

“Kubernetes makes our application extensible. We want our application to be very easy to change not just now but maybe 10 or 20 years from now. As what we have now will not be the gold standard 20 years down the line. We want our application to be better than those the legacy banks have,” says Beattie.

Running multiple services at the same time on a particular application and ensuring speed was a significant hurdle Monzo had to overcome.

“You cannot run 150 services on a single machine and expect all of them to be fast. What we wanted is to treat our application as a big pool of resources, which is what Kubernetes exactly allowed us to do. We can now run one big group of worker machines and run all our applications there and scale them up and down as needed. Owing to Kubernetes we are now able to reduce one-third of our infrastructure costs,” says Beattie.

Watch the full video to get deeper insights into how Kubernetes is helping Monzo build the best banking application ever.