MCredit: Transforming Business and Technology Models

“Cloudino & AWS have supported us in quickly transforming our business and technology models, helping us accelerate the speed of building and bringing new products to market.”

Introduction

Mcredit aims to become a convenient consumer finance company for everyone, preferred by customers for its diverse financial products and services that meet the needs of low-income earners from urban to rural areas.

Mcredit’s main products are: Cash loans and Installment loans, with superior product advantages, fast processing procedures, dedicated after-sales service, competitive interest rates, and a wide network, helping Mcredit quickly reach a large number of customers in a short period of time.

Challenges

At the time of its inception, before knowing about cloud platforms, Mcredit used physical infrastructure. However, to meet its goal of rapid growth and reaching a large customer base in Vietnam, especially low-income earners, Mcredit began exploring more advanced technology transfer options, as well as platforms optimized for deploying new applications in a short time.

The business had 10 major projects scheduled for 2021, a level of productivity they might never have achieved while running on-premises infrastructure. Additionally, build and deployment times for machine learning (ML) models in the data center were often slow, with limited scalability and memory capacity. The business frequently faced downtime in its data center, and its systems often crashed during peak load times when computing resources could not scale.

Furthermore, Mcredit aimed to grow its customer base to 1/10th of Vietnam’s population, approximately 10 million people. The challenge was how to keep the system operating smoothly and securely when the number of users surged in a short period while still ensuring a reasonable budget.

Solutions

Faced with technological challenges and rapid growth goals, Mcredit chose AWS and partnered with Cloudino to deploy the migration of its IT system to the cloud with AWS, utilizing many services such as: storage, compute, data management, cost management optimization, security, identity & compliance.

Cloudino helped Mcredit complete the transition to AWS in March 2021, using AWS cloud architectures such as Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) for orchestration. We also used Amazon Elasticsearch Service as a fully managed search solution on its technology platform. Managed services and Kubernetes architecture on AWS help ensure rapid deployment and faster time-to-market for all of Mcredit’s projects.

Cloudino outlined a detailed security and data migration strategy to begin Mcredit’s transition process. We deployed AWS Direct Connect with native encryption controls to protect data in transit and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) for secure network connectivity. AWS registers the highest compliance controls such as [Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard] PCI DSS and ensures the safety of Mcredit’s processes, systems, and solutions.

Deployed AWS Auto Scaling to automatically adjust capacity to maintain consistent system performance for Mcredit, resolving downtime issues and overload incidents when their resources could not scale in time.

Results

Migrating to AWS helped optimize the necessary process time, from proposal creation to final infrastructure setup, reducing it from four months to three weeks on AWS, which facilitated innovation across the company. Within three months of the transition, Mcredit launched a mobile application for customers to schedule and track their payments. The development team also added a new feature allowing customers to apply for new loans directly in the application, which is expected to improve overall customer retention.

Mcredit also reported higher availability and stability on the AWS cloud platform, allowing the company to serve customers at any time of the day. The business previously frequently faced downtime with its data center, and its systems often crashed during peak load times when computing resources could not scale. After migrating, Mcredit deployed AWS Auto Scaling, which automatically adjusts capacity to maintain consistent system performance.

By switching to a cloud-based data warehouse and database administration, the company reduced technical debt and transitioned to an operating expense (opex) model, avoiding the increased hardware and licensing fees that would otherwise have been incurred for the previous database system.

Implementation Services

• Amazon ECS: Container orchestration to help deploy and manage application containers.
• Amazon EKS: Fully managed Kubernetes orchestration to deploy and manage containerized applications.
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service: Fully managed search service, allowing for real-time data searching and analysis.
• AWS Auto Scaling: Automatically adjusts resource capacity to maintain system performance and resolve overloads.
• Amazon VPC: Service providing a virtual private network, helping to create a secure and isolated network environment to deploy AWS resources.

Benefits

• Accelerated innovation, rapid launch of mobile applications and new features for customers.
• Increased availability and stability, reduced infrastructure setup time.
• Reduced technical debt and transition to an Operating Expense (OPEX) Model.
• Gained flexible scalability according to usage needs.