MoneyCon ’19: Uber Hosts its First FinTech Engineering Conference

The domain of payments, finance, and more generally FinTech is a fast-growing industry that reached a record global investment of $111.8B in 2018. The underlying technology that powers this incredible growth is also evolving rapidly. With gross bookings of $50 billion for 2018, a global reach of more than 700 cities across 63 countries on six continents, and an evolving, constantly expanding suite of products, Uber must tackle large-scale technical challenges to best engineer these systems. 

Building financial systems at a global scale is a large endeavor. Talking with our peers in the industry, we discovered that we all faced similar challenges. In an effort to share best practices from our experiences in this domain, we hosted Uber’s first-ever MoneyCon, an event dedicated to highlighting the latest technologies and key learnings in the payments and finance engineering space.

On May 30, 2019 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, engineers at Uber, Netflix, Square, Ant Financial, Dropbox, Airbnb, and LinkedIn presented on such topics as tokenization, transaction routing, and reliable reprocessing, all key components of the technology powering successful financial systems at scale.

Uber Engineering Director Lee Crawford, keynote speaker, highlights the goals of MoneyCon and discusses the primary technical challenges Uber faces as it builds and grows our FinTech systems.   

Uber’s payment platform is a set of microservices connected with streams. In this talk, Uber engineers Emilee Urbanek and Manas Kelshikar present some of the hurdles our Payments Platform Engineering team faced when operationalizing this architecture and discuss the solutions we developed to build a more reliable payments processing system.

Square processes and disburses hundreds of millions of dollars per day. In this tech talk, Square engineer Anthony Bishopric discusses how his FinTech Engineering team applied a novel cryptographic concept and classic double entry accounting principles to facilitate the seamless and efficient processing and disbursement of payments on their platform.

A few years ago, Netflix decided to embark on a journey to implement scheme tokens in their payments system. During this presentation, Netflix engineers Kasia Trapszo and Remi Duvergey discuss the benefits of tokenization, the approach they used to implement it, and the lessons learned along the way.

During this tech talk, Dropbox engineers Kirill Sapchuk and Evgeny Skarbovsky highlight how revenue optimization (fighting involuntary churn) has evolved at their company over the last few years, from using retries to leveraging an ML-based approach.

In this presentation, LinkedIn’s Tim Tan gives the audience an inside look at how his company approaches payment transaction routing, taking into consideration local payments, fallbacks, and experimentation.

Airbnb Payments has a distributed, service oriented system for order management and payment processing. In this presentation, Airbnb engineers Sophie Behr and Jon Chew review the transition to that service oriented architecture and how they leveraged idempotency to make Airbnb’s systems robust and (eventually) consistent.

If you’re interested in learning more about how payments work at Uber, make sure to check out our other Payments Platform Engineering Blog articles.

We’re always looking for motivated people to join our team. We have openings in multiple locations and for various roles. Make sure to check it out!

We look forward to hosting the FinTech community at future MoneyCons! 

Acknowledgments
MoneyCon ‘19 would not have been possible without the incredible help and support of Uber’s Money and Tech Brand teams.