Financial Data Governance for a Gaming Platform with Staking

Many online platforms allow users to compete against each other, but few allow them to stake real-world money on their matches. Doing so greatly increases the risks and complexity associated with handling customer money and necessitates attention to governance. Extrasensory¹ was engaged to help finance understand and implement data governance from scratch with a view to a future handover. This allowed postponement of finance tech hires at this early stage, keeping headcount down.

Motivation

The client had built and launched an app for competitive gaming with stakes, but knew their data governance needed work before they scaled. The flow of money into the app and between users generated a highly connected network of transactions that made single-user reconciliation meaningless. Discrepancies would compound quickly, concealing the sources of errors in a cascade. Since the app was still in an early stage, features were being developed rapidly and management did not want to lose momentum to tracking down errors.

Approach

Extrasensory began by interviewing the CFO and COO to understand flows of money, how they related to the business model, and planned or foreseen changes that could increase complexity. We then developed an independent governance solution as follows:

• Identify complete and non-redundant set of facts required for reconciliation, ensuring exactly one source of truth for each.
• Instrument operational data stores, automate ETL, and populate a single-purpose data warehouse.
• Enumerate all business logic in an extensible framework of version-controlled code.
• Configure daily point-in-time snapshots and automated reconciliations between them.
• Automate backup of each snapshot, reconciliation, and all code in a dated and versioned artifact.

Results

With the above solution deployed and running, errors and bugs were guaranteed to generate immediate alerts. Any discrepancy between implied and actual, from duplicated transactions to one-cent rounding inconsistencies could be traced to a root cause, presented to engineering for correction, and documented as code in the extensible framework. Timely and concise bug reports saved engineering the frustration of troubleshooting highly intermittent behaviors. As the feature set and user volume grew the solution was extended and scaled entirely within its original framework, and remained ready for handover at an appropriate time.