Inter Expands Fintech Services and Serves 15 Million Customers on AWS

Financial technology (fintech) company Banco Inter S.A. (Inter) needed to assess its technology stack to meet consumer demands after growing its customer base from 400,000 to 15 million in only 3 years. To achieve this, the company needed to aggregate and evaluate data in real time so that it could launch more products and services and improve customer satisfaction.

On the strength of previous results, Inter turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to fine-tune its application and assess its technology stack. Inter was able to increase its visibility using software available in AWS Marketplace, a digital catalog with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors that makes it simple to find, test, buy, and deploy software that runs on AWS.

Established in 1994, Inter became the first fully digital bank in Brazil in 2014. Since then, Inter has expanded its application to be a one-stop shop that includes investments, insurance, loans, ecommerce, and even food delivery. As of 2021, it has served 15 million customers and expects to double its customer base within a few years. Its mission is to simplify banking and make it transparent and fair.

Inter began using AWS solutions to meet its computing infrastructure needs prior to its global expansion. “We are very proud to have migrated to cloud computing on AWS back in 2018—not only because we were the first bank in Brazil to do so but also because we knew that an AWS infrastructure would support our scale and growth for years to come,” says Guilherme Ximenes, chief technology officer of Inter. After migrating to AWS, Inter launched several new services on its application, including health, dental, and life insurance, as well as home brokering, cell phone plans, airline tickets, and a cash-back loyalty initiative. “By expanding our services using AWS, we have positioned Inter not only as a bank but also as a superapplication with both financial and nonfinancial products and services,” says Ximenes.

However, Inter’s exponential growth has come with some challenges—primarily tracking and using metrics in real time to identify areas of improvement. “We want to have full visibility of our technology stack, from infrastructure to the customer experience,” says Ximenes. “That visibility is essential for us because we are a digital bank and we don’t have any branches, which makes it even more important to have a great experience. We have to have very good word of mouth.” In 2020, Inter began to explore AWS Marketplace for solutions that would capture and present data in one cohesive place. “AWS Marketplace is where we can find cloud-native vendors to attend to our needs,” says Ximenes. “That’s something we’re always after—nimble companies that are cloud ready.”

Choosing from among over 10,000 solutions available in AWS Marketplace, Inter decided to monitor its data using New Relic One, a cloud-based observability solution that provides engineers with full visibility into the performance of their AWS cloud services. By using New Relic One, Inter has been able to evaluate its data in real time and quickly respond to outages and customer requests. Since its implementation, Inter has seen improvements. “Our Net Promoter Score is 84,” says Ximenes. “The observability solution that uses New Relic One on AWS helped us achieve that number.” Moreover, Inter was able to optimize savings because the software qualified for the Enterprise Customers discount program, a flexible pricing model that provides up to a 75 percent discount on predictable instance usage.

Inter also off-loads work by using the fully managed Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which provides highly available and secure clusters and automates key tasks such as patching, node provisioning, and updates. With a fast-growing customer base, Inter is able to scale its infrastructure to support upticks in customer requests and logins. “We are surpassing five billion requests per month,” says Ximenes. “In a very distributed environment with several Kubernetes clusters, we can support more than five million customer logins per day and easily have extra room for even more.”

Because of the automation, Inter can focus on developing new technology for its application. “We don’t need to be doing patches, so we have our teams focused on generating value for the business,” says Ximenes. “Standardization and automation everywhere are key. Today, we run at around 99.99 percent uptime on our login and other important services. That is a result of our team having time.” Additionally, Inter has been able to bolster the security of its application by implementing facial recognition technology in its application using Amazon Rekognition, a deep-learning-powered image recognition service that detects objects, scenes, and faces. “We aim to position ourselves as the best of both worlds—banking and fintech,” says Ximenes. “On the banking side, because we are regulated, we achieve a high standard in what we do and have a wide range of financial products. On the fintech side, we have a low cost structure, a digital environment, and an innovation-driven culture.”

Having exceeded its company goals, Inter plans to continue its expansion of services and customer base. It has already begun beta testing for its mobile application in the United States and recently acquired USEND, an American company that specializes in financial and nonfinancial services. Because USEND is licensed to operate in over 40 states, Inter sees this acquisition as an opportunity to capture a share in the US marketplace. Inter also plans to expand its digital marketplace to both Spain and Portugal in the near future. “We are going global,” says Ximenes. “Using AWS helps us make that move because we know we can deploy our products and services with ease to AWS Regions in the United States and Europe; otherwise, it would be difficult to build data centers near our customers in other countries.”

Expansion won’t detract from Inter’s refinement of its application. Inter is currently using AWS Graviton processors that use 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores to deliver the best price performance for cloud workloads on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. “Every millisecond counts for us because we are seeing millions of customers logging in to our application every day,” Ximenes says. Although growing from 400,000 customers to 15 million is a notable achievement, the company is also focused on what AWS can offer looking forward. “I don’t think of AWS as a vendor for us,” says Ximenes. “It is helping us achieve our goals.”