How Australia’s Trade Ledger built its cloud-based software

When Martin McCann and Mathias Born decided to create Trade Ledger, an Australian lending platform, their plan was to simplify and streamline lending services through cloud-based software for lenders. Their journey provides insights for CIOs in their own development efforts.

When Trade Ledger started to develop its software as a service, Born’s team was focused on how to build and architect a system that wouldn’t be obsolete in a few years. Beyond the technical choices, Born had to consider whether the whole team work independently on each piece of functionality, and managed and maintained their portions of that repository.

And, finally, in a business context, Born says it is important to know if the functionality is modular and can be used in different areas.

“It’s sometimes more an art than a science. But breaking those components down into the right context was definitely a challenge,” he says.

The challenges of building modular functions and adopting a microservices architecture

There were multiple challenges along the way around the approach to adopting a microservices architecture.

For organisations building a similar system, Born says that it is important to figure out if there are certain parts of the system that get a lot of usage and decouple them so the function can then be scaled independently.