Cloud Transformation Helped ABFL Enhance Delivery Time by Nearly 30-40%​

Aditya Birla Finance Ltd. (ABFL) is a leading provider of end-to-end lending, financing and wealth management solutions to consumers across India. The finance firm has launched a digital lending platform to offer products such as business and personal loans. This platform has multiple modules such as a loan origination system (LOS) and a loan management system (LMS). ABFL was looking for a partner to take complete ownership of the LOS module and manage their digital lending platform by hosting on the AWS cloud.​

The Need for Application Support for LOS and LMS Combined with Infrastructure Managed Services​

The digital lending platform of ABFL is meant for offerings such as personal and business loans. This involves a USP of quick approval within a time span of 30 minutes and faster loan disbursals without collaterals. Multiple modules of this digital lending platform for the User Journeys are created by the ABFL’s team. The firm is seeking a partner to take ownership of its LOS module and manage its AWS cloud resources that host its digital lending platform.​

LOS is the process where a borrower applies for a new loan while the lender processes that application. ABFL’s requirements involve end-to-end application monitoring, infrastructure support and maintenance for their user journeys for the LOS applications. The need for application support services to serve the issues include:​

• Front-end support queries and tickets​
• Backend support queries and tickets​
• APIs-related tickets​
• DB and data-related issues​
• Technical issues and queries​
• Application Monitoring​

These support tickets will support ABFL’s LOS application that serves multiple user journeys and modules. The stages that comprise the user journeys and modules supporting the LOS application are termed critical components for the loan processes. These include:​

• Pre-qualification​
• Loan Application​
• Application Processing​
• Underwriting Process​
• Credit Decision​
• Quality Control​
• Loan Funding​

The support of services needed for the application maintenance and monitoring will underpin the above-mentioned components.​

Blazeclan’s Solution of Combined Infrastructure and Application Support​

Blazeclan is engaged with ABFL’s digital team for supporting and enhancing a few modules of their LOS application. This, along with managing the complete AWS infrastructure that hosts their digital lending platform. We have proposed an SLA-driven application support-as-a-service for supporting and managing the application and infrastructure using tools such as New Relic and Blazeclan’s proprietary cloud management platform. Our provision of end-to-end application and cloud services support will cover all user journeys for the LOS application as well as the technology stack comprising Django, AngularJS, JAVA, MySQL and AWS services in a shared services Model (Onshore/Offshore).​

The user journey for this application will follow the following workflows​

1. Online Marketplace Personal Loan (OMPL) Journey​
2. Small Medium Enterprises (SME) Journey​
3. Partner API Journey​

Blazeclan is currently managing the cloud infrastructure for the complete platform and proposes to combine this with the proposed solution for seamless end-to-end support. This combination of Application and infrastructure support will cater to ABFL’s requirement for managing and monitoring their LOS application and AWS infrastructure.​

Approach for Application Support Managed Services​

In the approach for managed services, we proposed the firm have SLA-driven technical support. In this, access to ticket management will be given to the ABFL wherein they can raise a support ticket for both application and infrastructure. Also, tickets will be raised automatically via the New Relic APM and infrastructure monitoring tools.​

An end-to-end application maintenance and monitoring support will be provided to ABFL’s infrastructure by using 3 FTEs. This will support said the scope of services for a shared support model for the infrastructure, which is mentioned below.​

• Application Support will be performed by us during IST-based business hours, remotely via VPN. It is the responsibility of ABFL to ensure that access to VPN is made available to us.​
• On-site support, if and when required, will be on a case to case basis via mutual agreement by both Parties.​
• All monitoring will be handled by us 24/7.​
• The firm must inform us in advance before any changes are introduced to the existing environment under the scope of our support – hardware, software and network.​
• Blazeclan’s support scope only applies to the existing production infrastructure provided by ABFL to the Blazeclan to host the Blazeclan’s applications under the scope of this Schedule.​

Support Applications Managed by Blazeclan​

• Respond and resolve to support emails /calls /JIRA from Customer Caching Services.​
• Verify and evaluate the issues as per predefined Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). Get Entitlement (External API)​
• Perform specific activities like ​
• Automated reporting of data related to client activities.​
• Cache/DB purges and Script execution
• ​Create users and roles​
• Add additional channels to DB (Using interfaces) ​
• Changes to backend/database held config values​
• Generate ad-hoc reports using query interfaces (Need lead time of 3 to 4 working days based on complexity)​
• Perform a manual checklist of servers and services as per the schedule​
• Coordinate with Integrated Test & Operations System during downtime​

Benefits Achieved by ABFL​

Automation: Automated reporting on data validation and verification, which is sent daily to ABFL, provided their product managers with a complete overview of client activities. These include the failures in client onboarding status, the stage at which each data is, client background verification, and visibility on the active/inactive clients. Also, the solution delivered ABFL with automated monitoring of APIs for early identification and mitigation of infrastructure-level bottlenecks. ​

Cost Optimization: Our solution helped ABFL in optimizing its current infrastructure costs. This was done by cleaning unnecessary resources, performing log rotations, old AMI backup cleanups, downgrading unutilized resources like EC2 and RDS by identifying utilization trends, performing reservation on EC2 and RDS, performing life cycle policy on S3 buckets.​

Improved Performance: The end-user experience was significantly enhanced with the cloud migration. They achieved enhanced application support and with the use of prompt responses to client queries through tickets.​

360° credit assessment: The consumer journey is entirely online with digital decision making backed by rigorous and 360° credit assessment, providing applicants with real-time loan offers and sanctions. With the performance of unsecured lending in India steadily improving over the past 5 years and also with data now available with credit bureaus, and via certified digital vendors, the risk to lending can be controlled more effectively.​

Multi-Tenancy: Multitenancy resources are shared, for example, multiple users use the same resource, at the network level, host level, and application level. Also, users can rapidly increase and decrease their computing resources as needed and release resources for other uses when they are no longer required.

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Tech Stack ​