truID Develops Cloud-Native Credit App to Control Costs and Boost Performance with Levi9 on AWS

truID worked with AWS Partner Levi9 to modernize its cloud-based app. Using Amazon Web Services (AWS) it estimates it has cut cloud costs by 60 percent and reduced the development time for new features by 50 percent. The company, which provides financial services companies with authenticated consumer banking data to grant loans, can now provide customers with the exact set of financial data they require without having to manually reconfigure its application. Using AWS Lambda and Amazon EventBridge it can also scale easily when loan applications peak at the end of each month.

truID, a startup based in South Africa, delivers open banking data solutions that expedite the customer onboarding and validation procedures for financial service providers, reducing the time taken to gain credit approval from hours to minutes. An important feature of the truID platform is its ability to eliminate the necessity for consumers to visit their bank to furnish documentation as proof of income and creditworthiness, a mandatory step for all individuals in South Africa seeking credit. With a focus on credit onboarding, truID integrates into the workflows of banks, unsecured lenders, retailers, telecommunications companies, and any other company interested in extending credit.

Credit providers choose truID to eliminate the time involved in making physical office visits, a process that can deter loan applicants. The truID platform allows credit providers to integrate their systems via APIs to create a streamlined process for the consumer. This also allows credit providers to see authenticated finance information—such as transaction history and bank statements from the six biggest South African banks—to gain an instant and comprehensive view of an individual’s financial history and help make loan decisions.

truID was already using the cloud but had only migrated its platform without modernizing its applications. This had proved to be a difficult cloud journey, with application performance sub-optimal and scaling proving to be a major issue. In addition, its cloud provider had offered little support and cloud costs were spiraling out of control which, as a startup with limited funding, it could not afford to bear. It decided to work with AWS Partner Levi9, who recommended that the company migrate its platform to AWS and completely modernize its application from the ground up.

truID was able to benefit from the AWS Startup Migrate Program (SMP), a lighter version of the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) that offers free AWS credits. The company worked closely with Levi9 to provide migration and modernization development support and create a fully cloud-native minimum viable product (MVP), with the plan of testing the product before onboarding customers one by one. “We have had a lot of room to experiment in the modernization process,” says Christian Schuit, chief technology officer at truID. “AWS has given us lots of support—we’ve been able to reach out to them at any point in time.”

Levi9 began working on migration and modernization of the truID platform in early 2022, completing it in June that year. It began with a planning process to match the target architecture to the right AWS services, particularly serverless ones. After migrating key workloads, Levi9 began to build the core of the new platform on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. To process the business logic between application components in the cloud, truID uses AWS Lambda, allowing it to run code without thinking about servers or clusters.

Using AWS, the company can offer its customers a flexible service, providing them with the exact financial data they require. For example, customers can choose to view only income statements and mortgage payment data when processing loans, with the truID system automatically configuring each information request. For this, it uses Amazon EventBridge to build event-driven applications at scale across AWS. “Our customers can get the exact information they need without us having to make any coding changes,” says Schuit. “Using AWS helps our financial services customers to pinpoint what they need for each loan applicant, rapidly and easily.”

By building on AWS, truID only needs to pay for the cloud resources it uses, and it estimates that this will reduce its cloud costs by 60 percent. The time required to develop new application features has also been cut by 50 percent. The MVP version of the truID application can scale easily to meet peaks in demand, for example when loan application numbers rise at the end of each month. The company can also limit the number of API calls each customer makes, which also reduces cloud costs and traffic load on its system.

The company has also strengthened data access security. For this, it uses Amazon API Gateway, to create, maintain, and secure APIs at any scale. This means system access is authenticated immediately, without having to authenticate each application component. Because AWS services provide in-built encryption, the company has confidence that its infrastructure is secure. “We have saved a lot of time having to ensure everything is secure using AWS,” says Schuit. “While we have to encrypt discrete elements of our system, we can rely heavily on AWS for strong security.”

truID is continuing to gain financial support from AWS using the AWS Activate Startup Program. The company intends to use the financial and technical assistance the program offers to onboard its customers to the new platform and develop new revenue-generating application features, such as making payments and collections. In the future, it is also planning on rolling out its platform to countries where loan providers require similar consumer financial information to get loans, such as ones in sub-Saharan Africa.

With a secure end-to-end process supporting its cloud-based application, the company is now preparing to integrate its banking customers to the new platform, which it plans to complete by mid 2024. “By modernizing on AWS, truID has been able to build in a lot of platform flexibility,” says Codrin Baleanu, engineering lead at Levi9. “With its applications fully optimized for the cloud, all technical debt has been eliminated and the company is ready to support its customers.”

With its new cloud-native application, truID can keep its customers happy and grow its services. “With the help of Levi9, and by building on AWS, we have a high-performance infrastructure that’s highly intuitive and allows us to develop new features quickly,” says Schuit. “It’s easy to get it wrong when moving to a cloud provider, which is why the support of Levi9 and AWS has proved to be of huge value.”