Fintech PHP Applications: How PHP Supports the Finance Sector

The financial landscape is undergoing a rapid transformation driven by the rise of finance technology (Fintech). However, Fintech is not only about technology. Fintech is about re-imagining financial services to be more accessible, efficient, and secure. It helps individuals and businesses to make informed financial decisions, manage finances, and interact with the financial world. One aspect of Fintech includes Fintech PHP applications.

In this blog, I give an overview of PHP as a finance programming language, including key benefits and use cases. I then discuss a few best practices for Fintech PHP developers to utilize in their mission-critical finance or banking applications.

PHP as a Finance Programming Language: Overview

With over 75% of web applications using PHP, it's no surprise that the language is utilized within the finance and banking sector. In this section, I give a brief overview about how PHP is used in Fintech and common Fintech PHP compliance considerations.

Is PHP Used in Fintech?

Yes, PHP is used in Fintech. Fintech demands agile, secure, and scalable solutions, and PHP is a powerful language for building these innovative financial applications.

Within the constantly changing field of financial technology, PHP has become a well-liked option for building creative solutions that promote accessibility, ease of use, and efficiency within the many different domains related to the financial industry. 

PHP enables developers to build reliable and scalable finance solutions, from peer-to-peer lending apps to payment processing platforms to internal sites for knowledge transfer.

Fintech PHP Compliance Considerations

Fintech compliance refers to the adherence by financial technology companies to various regulatory laws and standards governing their operations. These include data privacy, cybersecurity, consumer protection, and anti-money laundering measures, ensuring all applications operate within legal boundaries across different jurisdictions.

The purpose of these regulations is to protect consumers, maintain financial stability, prevent financial crimes, and ensure responsible handling of sensitive financial data by Fintech companies. The major regulatory areas are the following:

• KYC (Know Your Customer) – Verifying the identity and background of customers to mitigate risks associated with money laundering and terrorist financing
• AML (Anti-Money Laundering) – Implementing procedures to detect and report suspicious financial activities related to money laundering
• Data Privacy – Complying with regulations like GDPR regarding the collection, storage, and processing of personal customer data
• Cybersecurity – Maintaining robust security measures to protect sensitive financial information from cyber threats
• Consumer Protection – Adhering to regulations ensuring fair and transparent treatment of customers when offering financial products

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How PHP Benefits Fintech Applications

In the bustling landscape of Fintech, PHP stands out as a language of choice for a multitude of reasons. Its ability to combine power, versatility, and affordability makes it an ideal tool. So, why should you consider PHP for your Fintech venture?

• Rapid Prototyping – PHP's rapid prototyping is simple and powerful. It allows developers to construct prototypes and improve features based on user feedback.
• Extensive Tech Stack – PHP offers a rich ecosystem of frameworks and libraries ready to cater to specific Fintech needs, including interfacing with third-party systems.
• Scalability – PHP excels at handling high-traffic applications. Its architecture scales to accommodate growing user bases and complex financial transactions.
• Security – PHP, with its encryption libraries, offers robust security audits. 

Modern PHP, when implemented with best practices in mind, can be absolutely secure and performant for Fintech applications as it is strictly typed and offers libsodium cryptography, async co-routines, and more. Choose well-maintained frameworks, utilize encryption, leverage security libraries, and execute code on top of compliant infrastructure (such as meeting CIS benchmarks).

Use Cases: When Is PHP the Best Coding Language for Finance?

While PHP may not be the most popular choice for Fintech applications, it does serve critical uses within the industry, including powering internal applications and working behind financial services API gateways.

Internal Apps for Companies in Finance

From a business perspective, internal applications must respond to the following main requirements:

• Deliver value fast (Time to Market)
• Easy to develop and maintain
• Easily intersect multiple domains
• Simplified resource management

A technology like PHP perfectly encompasses all the above requirements. All major frameworks within the PHP ecosystem (including Laravel, Symfony, Laminas, and others) can be used to bootstrap a project of this nature with the guarantee that all the business requirements are met.

For example, Zend has several banking customers, each with tens or even hundreds of internal applications. These internal applications are spacing domain extensions like knowledge transfer, exact transfer load (ETL), managerial communication, surveys, payrolls, etc.

In general, for the Fintech industry, PHP would be a great technology choice for any internal solution that does not require the following traits:

• Realtime, huge number of connections with extremely fast processing time
• Need to handle Big Data workflows

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Behind Financial Services API Gateways

An Application Programming Interface (API) gateway is a tool that manages and optimizes API traffic. It acts as an entry point for API calls, which are requests from clients to applications and services. API gateways can help enforce security protocols, manage permissions, and improve application performance.

The Fintech industry, from inception and without exception, has standardized the interfacing layer over HTTP based APIs, hence the absolute need for robust and secure API gateway solutions (Amazon API Gateway, Akana, Apigee, etc.).

The most popular API gateways are not generally developed in PHP. However, an API gateway is the entry point of the HTTP communication, and a decoupling layer for the HTTP request/response paradigm needs to terminate on a server in order to deliver a business logic dependent result. In many cases, the servers delivering the response are running PHP. This is due to the following reasons:

• PHP is a gluing technology that supports many databases and third-party integrations via libraries
• PHP is very scalable, and stateless by architecture
• PHP offers an independent and very portable platform
• PHP is easy to test and debug

The most prominent use cases for Fintech PHP solutions are related to domains are mobile wallets, contactless payments, money lending, financial advising, and investment risk calculations.

Fintech PHP Best Practices

Ensuring security, compliance, and performance in Fintech PHP applications is essential, as financial data, transaction records, and sensitive personal information make these applications prime targets for cyber threats. Following these Fintech PHP best practices, along with others specific to your application and business, is essential.

Adhere to Fintech Compliance and Regulatory Standards

The Fintech domain presents many technological security challenges. Transaction records, payment information, and sensitive financial data, such as personal data, are handled by Fintech applications. As such, they are easy pickings for fraud, data breaches, and cyber attacks. 

SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), session seizing, and unauthorized access to sensitive data are common security risks within the financial industry. Furthermore, the surface range for possible security vulnerabilities is increased by the interconnected nature of fintech ecosystems, which include various partners and integration points. 

Because of this, developers need to have strong security measures in place to protect PHP fintech applications from online attacks. Every application in the sector should be compliant to one or more of the following standards:

• PCI DSS – PCI DSS compliance involves adhering to twelve requirements, covering areas like network security, encryption, vulnerability management, access control, monitoring, and information security policies.
• DORA – The DORA regulation requires financial institutions to implement robust risk management practices for information and communications technology (ICT), including regular testing, incident reporting, and third-party risk management.
• GDPR – The GDPR is a European Union law that protects the privacy of personal data. It's considered the world's strongest data protection law.
• ISO 27001 – ISO 27001 helps businesses create an Information Security Management System, providing a blueprint for establishing security controls, identifying and mitigating information security threats, and complying with global regulations.

Use the Most Up-to-Date PHP Version

Just like car manufacturers regularly release new and improved engines with better performance, efficiency, and security features, the creators of PHP also release new versions of the programming language with similar improvements. So, when we talk about upgrading PHP versions, it’s like swapping out the old engine in your car for a newer, better one.

Upgrading PHP typically brings benefits such as faster execution times, better security, and compatibility with newer technologies. In the Fintech industry, tech advancements related to security – such as CVE patching, encrypting algorithms, and strict typing enhancements – are especially important.

In a fast-paced sector like Fintech, where security is paramount (and furthermore regulated), keeping up to date on your technology core pieces like PHP is the only possible choice. Unless you partner with a third-party long-term support (LTS) provider such as Zend, no compliance can be achieved if using unsupported versions of PHP, as every security scanning tool will flag the issue immediately. 

Complete Rigorous PHP Testing

Fintech is a heavily regulated vertical, and no application can be released without the most rigorous and complete testing phase.

Testing Fintech PHP applications involves validating the functionality, performance, security, and accuracy of the API by sending requests and verifying the responses received, ensuring it functions correctly and delivers expected data under different conditions. A successful testing strategy must comprise all of the following macro components:

1. Functional Tests – Analyze specific functions within the code base to ensure that the API works within the expected parameters and can handle errors when results are outside the designated parameters.
2. Reliability Tests – Guarantee that the API can produce consistent results and that the connection between platforms is reliable.
3. Security Tests  – Validate the encryption methods used by the API and the access control design. Security tests include validation of authorization controls for resource access and user rights management.
4. Penetration Tests – Based on security tests, this test consists of attacking the API with limited knowledge of it. This enables testers to analyze the attack vector from an outside perspective. Attacks used in penetration testing can target specific elements of the API, or the API in its entirety.
5. Fuzzy Logic Tests – Forcibly introduces huge amounts of random data into the system, enabling the creation of negative behavior, such as a forced crash or overflow.

As a technology, PHP lends itself easily to testing automations. Very good libraries exist to support fundamental aspects of the above-mentioned testing domains, and the language plays well with the most popular testing tools. 

At Zend, we have seen our customers addressing the challenge of PHP testing with container-based testing automations within CI/CD practices, supported by developing patterns like GitOps or similar.

Final Thoughts

PHP plays a small but vital role in Fintech applications, delivering powerful, secure, and scalable solutions. But, as the Fintech landscape grows, developers must remain vigilant about following Fintech PHP best practices, ensuring compliance, security, and performance while utilizing the latest PHP versions. 

With the right strategies in place, PHP can effectively support the evolution of financial services and Fintech applications, helping businesses build reliable solutions that meet the needs of a strict and quickly changing industry.

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Additional Resources

• Blog - Open Source in Finance: Top Technologies and Trends
• Blog - How to Build a Backup and Recovery Plan for PHP Web Apps
• Blog - A Developer's Guide to Building PHP APIs
• Blog - How to Plan and Execute Your Next PHP Upgrade
• Resource Collection - Guide to PHP Security
• Case Study - PHP Support for Citizens Equity First Credit Union (CEFCU) Internal Systems