The rapid evolution of financial technology has fundamentally altered how investment and lending services are designed, deployed, and consumed, creating unprecedented demands for scalability, security, resilience, and performance across digital financial platforms. Mutual fund and loan management systems, in particular, represent a class of mission-critical fintech applications where architectural decisions have direct implications for regulatory compliance, transactional integrity, customer trust, and long-term sustainability. Within this context, cloud-native architectural paradigms—especially microservices and serverless computing—have emerged as dominant yet contested approaches, each promising distinct advantages while introducing new layers of complexity. This research article develops an extensive, theory-driven, and literature-grounded examination of how microservices and serverless architectures can be systematically integrated to support scalable fintech platforms, with a specific analytical focus on secure and high-performance mutual fund and loan management systems. Building on contemporary scholarship in fintech systems engineering and cloud architecture, the study situates its inquiry within the broader evolution of cloud application architectures, tracing historical transitions from monolithic systems to distributed microservices and, more recently, to function-as-a-service models (Kratzke, 2018; Van Eyk et al., 2019).

The article places particular emphasis on architectural scalability as a socio-technical construct shaped by performance engineering, organizational practices, and ecosystem dynamics within fintech innovation networks (Still et al., 2019). Drawing conceptually from recent empirical and design-oriented studies on microservices performance, serverless execution models, and hybrid deployment strategies, the research critically evaluates trade-offs related to latency, cost predictability, state management, and fault tolerance (Fan et al., 2020; Lloyd et al., 2018). A central contribution of this work is the synthesis of these architectural debates with domain-specific requirements articulated in contemporary fintech system design literature, especially the design principles for secure, high-performance mutual fund and loan platforms proposed by Krishna modadugu (2025). By embedding these principles into a broader architectural analysis, the article demonstrates how fintech-specific concerns—such as transactional consistency, auditability, regulatory reporting, and data sovereignty—reshape conventional interpretations of cloud-native best practices.

Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative, interpretive research design grounded in systematic literature analysis and architectural reasoning. Rather than proposing a single prescriptive solution, the article develops a layered conceptual framework that explains how microservices and serverless components can be orchestrated across different functional domains of fintech platforms, from customer onboarding and portfolio management to loan origination, risk assessment, and settlement workflows. The results are presented as analytically derived insights that reveal patterns, tensions, and design heuristics emerging from the literature. The discussion extends these findings through critical engagement with competing scholarly viewpoints, addressing unresolved challenges such as distributed transaction management, performance variability, and long-term maintainability in hybrid architectures (Štefanko et al., 2019; García-López et al., 2019). By articulating both the promise and the limitations of integrating microservices and serverless computing in fintech contexts, this article contributes a comprehensive and theoretically rich foundation for future research and practice in secure, scalable financial system architecture.

Fintech architecture, microservices, serverless computing, mutual fund systems

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