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Design a scalable banking system | Meta Interview Question

Design a scalable banking system

Last updated: Mar 29, 2026

Quick Overview

This question evaluates expertise in designing scalable, reliable financial systems, testing competencies in distributed system architecture, transactional guarantees (ACID), double-entry data modeling, concurrency control, durability, security, and operational concerns such as monitoring and rate limiting.

System Design: Core Banking Platform

Problem

Design a banking system that supports:

Account creation
Balance inquiry
Deposit and withdrawal
Atomic transfers between accounts, including cross-currency

Specify:

External APIs (with idempotency)
Data model (double-entry ledger)
Transaction flows guaranteeing ACID, overdraft prevention, and concurrency control
Durability, auditability, reconciliation, and cross-service consistency
Scaling strategy (sharding/partitioning)
Failure handling (sagas vs. distributed transactions)
Security (authentication, authorization, encryption, PCI considerations)
Rate limiting and monitoring

Assume you are designing for a high-traffic consumer banking workload with mobile/web clients and internal services. You may introduce minimal context (e.g., a base reporting currency) where needed.

Solution

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