Enabling Programmable Bank Cards To Do All The Things

A little while back, Offerzen and Investec opened up their Programmable Bank Card Beta for South Africans, taking over from Root, and I was excited to be able to sign up!

My long-term goal with programmable banking is to integrate crypto transactions directly with my regular banking — which might be possible quite soon as Investec is starting to roll out its open API offering in addition to the card programme — and as far as I can tell that could be a real game-changer in terms of making crypto trading practical for non-investment purposes.

When I joined, though, what I found was a disparate group of really interesting projects and only a two-second time window to influence whether your card transaction will be approved or not.

I decided to bide my time by building a bridge for everyone else’s solutions, one which would provide a central location to determine transaction approval and enable card holders (including myself, of course) to forward their transactions securely to as many services as they like without costing them running time on their card logic.

It was obvious to me that this needed to be a cloud solution, and as someone with zero serverless experience* I spent some time evaluating AWS, Google and Microsoft’s offerings. My priorities were simple:

• right tool for the job
• low cost
• high performance
• good user experience