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by Seven Peaks on Jan 16, 2024 4:03:40 PM
If you're part of the FinTech industry in Thailand, Ascend Money is likely a familiar name to you. The mention of their flagship product, TrueMoney Wallet, undoubtedly rings a bell—an application widely utilized for everyday transactions.
This article dives into the history of Ascend Money, shedding light on how their tech stack plays a pivotal role in the development of their successful digital product.
Ascend Money’s History
Established in 2013 as a subsidiary of True Corporation before joining CP Group later, Ascend Money embarked on a mission to tackle the limited landscape of digital payments in Thailand. Recognizing the gap in the market, they introduced TrueMoney Wallet—a digital wallet platform enabling convenient and swift purchases and bill payments for the Thai population.
The platform's success was rapid, with over 50 million users by 2023, and it is expanding its services across Southeast Asia. Ascend Money further solidified its position by securing over 5 billion baht in Series C funding, propelling it into the ranks of Thailand's most valuable unicorns.
Beyond addressing user pain points, the strategic implementation of an effective tech stack played a pivotal role in Ascend Money's success. The term "tech stack," short for technology stack, refers to the assortment of tools and technologies employed by a team in software development. Typically divided into backend and frontend components, this includes programming languages, software, databases, frameworks, libraries, APIs, and cloud computing.
To delve into Ascend Money's tool specifics, we turn to Mongkol Thongkraikaew, Head of Platform Engineering at Ascend Money. In his role overseeing cloud computing, DevOps, and overall system performance, Thongkraikaew provides insights into the technology that underpins the success of Ascend Money's innovative products.
Ascend Money’s Toolkits
Ascend Money employs a sizable and intricate set of development tools, managing more than 400 microservices operating on production across a multi-cloud environment. Achieving this involves automating and streamlining every step, utilizing a variety of tools. Here are some examples of the tools they use:
- Infrastructure and Platform
- Terraform
- Ansible
- Cloudflare
- DevOps and DevSecOps (CI/CD)
- Jenkins
- SonarQube
- Monitoring, Logging, and Tracing (Observability)
- Thanos
- Kafka
- Application Languages and Frameworks (Backend & Frontend)
- Spring Boot
- NextJS
- React
- Testing Tools
- Mountebank
- JMeter
- Green Coffee
- Databases, Storage, and Messages Queue
- MySQL
- Oracle
- MongoDB
- Mobile Programming Languages and Technology
- Swift
- Objective-C
- Kotlin
- Java
- Machine Learning and Data Analytics
- GCP
- InfluxDB
- Debezium
- Data Studio (presently called Looker Studio)
Their Tech Strategy Overview
It's worth highlighting that Ascend Money not only leverages existing technologies optimized for performance to support millions of users daily but also places a high priority on security tools.
Thongkraikaew emphasizes that while the tools used might not be a perfect fit, considerations such as business requirements and other factors are crucial in selecting the most suitable tools for the organization. This ensures that the tools are indispensable, the team comprehends them thoroughly, can troubleshoot effectively, and maximizes their utility.
With meticulously curated technologies guided by experts and a well-planned strategy, it comes as no surprise that Ascend Money has achieved success and continues to thrive in today's highly competitive FinTech market.
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