AllCloud Leverages AWS to SaaSify Lending Technology

Guest post by (L to R) Rahul Jain, Ashish Khadloya and Ankith Khadloya, Co-founders – AllCloud

Empowering more than 500 lenders with a SaaS-based lending technology platform, AllCloud has changed how technology is perceived by banks and non-banking financial institutes.

“In an industry so diverse with various structures and procedures, we have been able to create a solution that is extremely configurable and allows personalization of workflows and processes, whilst still being on a common underlying tech architecture,” says Rahul Jain, Co-founder of AllCloud.

Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Hyderabad, AllCloud is a leading lending technology provider that offers end-to-end lending management solutions for clients across India, South East Asia, and Africa. Everything from loan origination, credit decisioning, loan management and collections, to reporting and analytics – it all becomes automated, efficient, and accurate.

AllCloud has taken a cloud-first approach– the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product, AutoCloud, has an enterprise version has been deployed on AWS as a license product for companies that required a private deployment and a highly personalized solution.

The Challenge

Currently, banking technology is a complex web of unintegrated technology solutions stitched together by large IT teams on multiple disparate systems hosted on different servers, thus making it difficult to maneuver through complex technology paths. Moreover, frequent data transfers across multiple systems create redundancies and bottlenecks that delays quick decision making and require reconciliation and checks at each point.

Business teams need agility and speed to implement innovative ideas. Speed of delivery is very critical yet grossly understated. The business teams’ dependence on technology to create solutions, the technology team’s lack of expertise, and the delay in delivery all add up to one thing – loss of business.

The Epiphany

AllCloud recognized this gap in the market and realized that technology hosted on the cloud could be a game changer – delivering scalable SaaS technology to financial institutions with managed cloud infrastructure, thereby reducing their IT personnel & hardware requirements, could add tremendous value to the global financial market. Leveraging the founders’ deep lending expertise, it became obvious for AllCloud to focus on the lending arm of the financial services industry.

The Need of the Hour

Business innovation needs the support of agile systems that allow seamless flow of information in highly available and secured channels. Security, privacy, and compliance are fundamental requirements for financial institutions, and AllCloud could address it all by partnering with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Today’s regular technology usage is mobile-first; an omnichannel, universal access approach mandates an API-driven composable system that provides the required agility and security.

The Initiative

Leveraging AWS’ cloud infrastructure, AllCloud built a new-age lending technology platform, AutoCloud, that is highly automated and robust. This multi-tenant SaaS application enables lenders to manage the entire lending cycle and customer journey. Financial institutions can introduce innovative loan products with just a few clicks and without any technical intervention – it’s all no-code.

Ankith Khadloya, Co-founder and Director of Projects at AllCloud, says, “Our business process management engine and architecture is so robust that we are able to handle complex customer requirements and deliver bespoke products to our clients on the same code base.”AllCloud’s lending platforms are highly robust and comply with bank-grade security standards and process 200,000+ loan applications every month.

Highly Scalable, Cloud Native Platform

AutoCloud was conceptualized, built, and delivered on and around AWS services from its inception. The autoscaling feature of AWS allows us to serve large workloads on an ad hoc basis with on-demand instances, thereby delivering a seamless experience – all while saving costs and passing those savings along to clients. AutoCloud uses AWS SDKs for development, which makes the application highly compliant with the existing AWS services, including but not limited to the following:

• AWS Simple Queuing Service (AWS SQS) for batch operations
• Amazon ElasticCache for increasing throughput
• Amazon S3 for secure document storage
• Web farming using AWS’ Auto Scaling functionality
• Using the multi-Availability Zones (AZ) feature of Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) service, the data is stored at multiple locations at a time, making AutoCloud highly resilient and preventing data loss during major events.

Future-Proof – Ease of Integration

AutoCloud has been built into a composable system with every module & function made into an independent API. This ensures it is highly adaptable to change and can interact with various data-points in the current open banking era. Open API specifications (RESTful API) are used to ensure every API can easily interact with other APIs. All APIs have been well-documented to ensure the integration process is streamlined & communication with partner organizations becomes smooth. AutoCloud uses AWS API Gateway to securely enable the system to interact with various other systems and integrate with various data providers.

Technology – always updated, always compliant

For more than 6 years, AllCloud has been working with leading banks and financial institutions very closely and has gained deep expertise and insights into the lending ecosystem.  Over the years, AutoCloud has matured with strong positive feedback from customers, and change in regulations are now creating favorable conditions for banks and NBFCs to review and realign their systems and and adopt new technology. Since that has become the core of operations, those financial institutions invest lot of effort to be compliant with various regulatory and information technology compliance, especially as there is high risk and cost associated with non-compliance.

Security “OF” the Cloud, Security “IN” the Cloud

As AutoCloud manages financial and Personal Identifiable Information (PII) data of customers that is regulated by government bodies, it is very important to secure data and adhere to the laws of the land. In this regard, AWS was our go-to option as it provides all the security services which enables us to secure the data. AWS itself is ISO 27001, PCI-DSS & SOC-certified, which helps AllCloud reduce its compliance cost and ensure that the data is safe. AutoCloud is implemented as a fully hosted SaaS web application deployed in a separate Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) on cloud infrastructure.

AWS provisions highly secure, extremely scalable and highly reliable cloud computing environments and operates a shared responsibility model in relation to security. It provides and manages processing and network infrastructure and is responsible for all aspects of the physical and environmental security of the cloud. AllCloud is fully responsible for security in the cloud. In practice, this means that the development and support of the AutoCloud application, data content, OS device hardening, and application deployment is wholly performed by AllCloud.

While AWS manages security of cloud, it provides services like AWS GuardDuty for threat detection, Amazon Cloudwatch for audit of access, AWS IAM for access management, and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), which acts as a firewall, plus a host of other features that enable AutoCloud to deliver best in class security in the cloud.

“The AWS security team is extremely friendly and helpful, which helps us resolve many customer queries coming from the CISOs of leading financial institutions. Without AWS, providing a SaaS system to a regulated financial institution is a far dream,” according to Khadloya.

Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery

Protecting data and systems is an important part of business continuity planning, especially for financial institutions. Whether you experience a natural disaster, power failure, or any other crisis, having your data stored in the cloud ensures it is backed up and protected in a secure and safe location. Being able to access your data again quickly allows you to conduct business as usual, minimizing any downtime and negligible loss of productivity.

BCP (Business Continuity Planning) establishes a practical plan for businesses to prepare for and continue to operate after any incident or crisis. A business continuity plan helps to:

• Identify preventable risks wherever possible
• Prepare for risks that can’t be controlled
• Respond quickly and recover if any incident or crisis does occur

Innovation at AllCloud with AWS

According to various reports, the global digital-lending platforms market is expected to approach $20 billion by 2026 based on the CAGR of 19.6% from 2014 to 2020. Trends like the rise of machine learning technology adoption has turned the tables on traditional lending, allowing for more accurate and faster decisions by transforming decision-making process from scrutiny of individuals to analysis of trends.

In line with AllCloud’s philosophy of continuous innovation and relevance, AllCloud has created an ecosystem where customer feedback and recommendation are prominently imbued into the product development, thus furthering innovation across the whole system. With the experience of handling more than 400 clients, we have created robust and powerful system that is highly scalable, customizable, integrable, and rapidly deployable at financial institutions of various scope and size across multiple domains. In order to bridge this gap, AllCloud will invest in creating an omnichannel solution by leveraging the power of cloud, machine learning, and AWS textract to deliver its clients a competitive advantage by further innovating across the lending ecosystem and delivering an AI/ML driven model for default prediction prior to material events, credit assessment for collect data-driven insights, and solutions for mobile-first users.

• An early warning system to be able to predict default prior to material events
• Credit Assessment Model – to add value by delivering data-driven insights
• Mobility solutions – for better customer experience

Contact us to enquire how AllCloud can help you achieve digital transformation in lending.