Perfios Halves Development Time on AWS by Upskilling More than 60% of its Workforce

Perfios, a leading provider of financial statement analysis software in India, has been on a rapid growth trajectory since its founding in 2008. The company has launched products in response to traditional loan origination evaluation processes, which are manual and error-prone, often leading to loan approval delays from financial institutions. Perfios provides an automated solution that streamlines loan origination so lenders can provide customers with loans faster.

 

The company runs its Perfios Data Aggregation and Analytics Platform on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud to drive growth and meet customer demand. Ramgopal Cillanki, senior vice president and head of Engineering at Perfios, says, “As a software as a service [SaaS] platform, scalability, security, and high availability are critical, and AWS meets our requirements.” As the company grew, it increasingly focused on speeding up its creation of new product lines for both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) customers. “We wanted to deliver products faster but realized that we needed more trained talent. Otherwise, some of our initiatives might take several years to become successful,” Cillanki explains.

 

To support this goal, Perfios sought to shorten its product development timelines and engaged with AWS Training and Certification, which helps organizations build and validate their AWS skills, to provide comprehensive technical training.

Hundreds of financial institutions in 18 countries use Perfios’s data platform, which relies on machine learning technology to extract, categorize, and analyze unstructured data to automate decision-making, customer onboarding, risk pricing, and fulfillment. The company categorizes more than 500 million transactions each month and supports over 1,700 data formats.

 

To drive faster development, Perfios wanted to help its developers close gaps in their AWS knowledge. “We knew we had to train our developers on serverless technologies, DevOps, and managed services to build the expertise we needed,” says Cillanki. The AWS Training and Certification team first helped Perfios complete the Learning Needs Analysis, an assessment tool to identify cloud and other technology skills gaps that the AWS team uses to design a customized learning plan. “This was a great way for us to find out where our teams stood in terms of technology expertise,” says Cillanki. “It helped us understand the current skill set and capabilities of individuals, their interest areas, and the depth of their knowledge.” Based on the analysis, AWS created a targeted training plan and led Perfios through a series of 11 technology tracks comprising 25 training sessions on topics including technology essentials, DevOps, containers, big data, and architecture.

 

Many Perfios employees started with the Developing on AWS classroom training course, which is a comprehensive three-day course delivered by expert AWS instructors with deep technical knowledge. The instructors taught Perfios developers how to build secure and scalable applications on AWS. “We wanted to cover the entire breadth of training based on the experience of our employees,” says Cillanki. “Overall, we’ve trained over 500 employees—more than 60 percent of our workforce. This included people from our development, quality assurance, DevOps, and IT teams, and many of them have become AWS Certified.”

 

By adopting AWS serverless technologies and AWS Managed Services as a result of training, Perfios has achieved one of its primary goals: accelerating product development. “We have reduced development time by more than 50 percent because of the skills our developers gained from AWS Training and Certification,” says Cillanki. “Now, our developers can scale applications more easily and have the DevOps expertise they need to move faster.”

 

By growing their cloud skills, the company’s developers have designed and deployed new software products and features for nine Perfios business units. For example, the company launched products including data aggregation and analytics, scanned document digitization, and account aggregator solutions, all of which utilize managed services and serverless technologies. These new solutions help analyze customer application forms, income and tax documents, and other information used by clients for credit decisions in lending cases. “Our new products will help us grow our B2B and B2C business,” says Cillanki.

Perfios can now more easily support its business expansion plans because of its reduced development timelines. “We can develop and deploy our software faster because of the training we received from AWS and the automation built into our development processes,” says Cillanki.

 

The company plans to continue its AWS training to help its employees learn about new AWS machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies. Cillanki concludes, “We have a very strong relationship with AWS with frequent connections. This plays an important role as we plan for our future growth.”