Protium Accelerates Credit Risk Assessment on Digital Lending Platform

Alternative credit scores such as cashflow, banking information, and tax filings can play a pivotal role in assessing creditworthiness and facilitating loan approvals, especially for individuals and MSMEs with limited credit history. This fosters greater financial inclusion, ensuring access to credit for the unbanked and ‘yet to be fully digital’ customers across tier 2 and beyond geographies.

As a multi-product, omnichannel loan origination system, Turiya leverages alternative data sources to evaluate the credit risks of individuals and MSMEs. Turiya’s workflow-based model also seamlessly integrates with over 200 Application Programming Interface (APIs), automating manual tasks in the loan application process. This results in a more streamlined and efficient experience for borrowers.

Through Turiya's reliable, scalable, compliant, and cost-effective cloud environment, Protium can realize its vision of driving financial equity for individuals and MSMEs across India.

With Turiya deployed on AWS, Protium can now provide secured and instant digital loans to MSMEs across India. Loan approvals and disbursements now take under 2 hours—12 times faster than manual processing. This accelerated time frame gives individuals and MSMEs faster access to critical loans for their businesses.

Protium also uses AWS to create a flexible model for Turiya, allowing it to easily integrate new APIs without the need for complex pre-deployment tests. As a result, the company can now roll out updates and new features faster, reducing time-to-market by 30 percent.

To ensure its lending platform runs smoothly and efficiently, Protium deployed Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon Aurora, and AWS Lambda. Amazon EKS is a managed Kubernetes service that works to make sure all the various parts of Turiya, including its containerized applications work together seamlessly. Alongside this, Amazon Aurora provides built-in security, continuous backups, serverless compute, and Amazon Lambda acts as a serverless, event-driven compute service to facilitate workflows on Turiya. With these AWS services working in concert, Protium's lending platform can maintain a virtually uninterrupted availability. Turiya can also automatically scale its Kubernetes control plane nodes to make sure the platform can automatically manage increased workloads and perform credit risk assessments without any delays or interruptions.

Protium also uses Amazon SageMaker and Foundation models to develop credit models much faster, helping data scientists spend less time on setting infrastructure and more time re-iterating models. This means more accurate models to serve its diverse set of customers.

On the security front, Protium deployed Amazon Route 53, a Domain Name System (DNS) service, and AWS WAF, which protects web applications from common web exploits and bots. Together, these two AWS services help to maintain high availability, filter web requests, and minimize the risk of unauthorized access to user accounts. Protium uses Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Security Hub and AWS Config and Amazon Detective to identify security events and resolve them. Additionally, Protium adheres strictly to the AWS Well-Architected framework, which describes key concepts, design principles, and architectural best practices for designing and running workloads in the cloud. With the framework, Protium has managed to keep data safe and separate across different AWS accounts, thereby saving cost and meeting data security-related rules and regulations.

The AWS team played a crucial role in helping Protium save costs and optimize its lending platform. The AWS team guided Protium in its migration from Intel-based processors to AWS Graviton2-based Amazon EC2 instances, which improved the price-performance ratio by up to 40 percent. AWS also recommended a combination of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Spot Instances (Amazon EC2 Spot Instances) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Reserved Instances (Amazon EC2 Reserve Instances) to take advantage of unused and reserved Amazon EC2 capacity in the cloud. Amazon EC2 Spot Instances alone helped the company achieve over 25 percent in cost savings.