Flentas Godrej Housing Finance | Fintech cloud case study

Client Profile

Godrej Capital Limited (GCL) is the financial arm the Godrej Industries and the holding entity for Godrej Housing in Finance (an HFC) and Godrej Finance Limited (an NBFC). It offers secured loans, i.e., Home Loans and Loan against Property (LAP), and plans to venture into affordable housing and unsecured lending in the near future. Currently, the business is present in five cities i.e., Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Bengaluru, Pune, and Ahmedabad. It will be soon expanding operations to six new cities i.e., Chandigarh, Hyderabad, Chennai, Indore, Surat, and Jaipur. Deeply anchored in Godrej Group’s 125-year legacy of trust and excellence, Godrej Capital Limited focuses on a digital-first approach, product innovation, data-driven decision-making and balanced risk fundamentals to become a leading retail financial services institution in the years ahead.

Rolling out a new Business in the Cloud

The business, Godrej Capital, started operations as Godrej Housing Finance in 2020 with the aim to expand its footprint across the country. To fulfil these ambitions, the business entity did not want to acquire physical capital assets. Rather, they chose to leverage the on-demand and scaling capabilities of the Cloud services, thus onboarding Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Flentas Approach

From inception, the team at Flentas engaged with the business leadership team to understand their vision of wanting to be a new-age digital entity, rather than a traditional finance company. Cloud became the most viable option for Godrej Housing Finance, as it aligned with their business ethos of being agile, flexible, and lean with their IT infrastructure, and above all, being digital-first. This resulted in multiple discussions between Flentas and the leadership team at Godrej Housing Finance to design their IT infrastructure architecture on the Cloud. After evaluating various platforms, Godrej Housing Finance opted for Amazon Web Services (AWS), benefiting from its flexible pay-as-you-go model and the infinite scale to handle future growth to build their entire digital infrastructure. The teams worked together to understand the deployment strategy, application integration, AWS Cloud architecture, and network infrastructure topology on Cloud.

Measuring Success

Faster Go-to-Market Business was go-live in less than 9 months.

Infrastructure Provisioning and Orchestration We helped set up the Landing Zone and IT infrastructure for all the applications for Godrej Housing Finance to start operations in less than two months. We helped provision end-to-end architecture, not just the server, but storage, load balancers, VPC (Virtual Private Cloud), Network Topology, Security groups, RDS, and other required services, including implementing AWS best practices.

Architecting Highly Available Cloud Solution During the initial phases of interaction, a cloud readiness assessment was done with all application owners and vendors. This included assessing the current lending technology - loan origination system (LOS) and loan management system (LMS) used for core applications, document management, and integration with other digital partners, which is crucial for any Financial Services company. For all applications to work in tandem, we ensured multiple deep-dive sessions with the technical team at Godrej Housing Finance. This ensured a scalable and highly available architecture by developing a cloud architecture that features elastic compute and storage at multiple data centres in the AWS Mumbai region, thereby making load balancing distribution easy.

Flexibility with Pay-As-You-Go Model A traditional capital expenditure (CapEx) funding model includes purchasing hardware, software licenses, equipment, etc. With the AWS pay-as-you-go model, the business has total control over cloud costs and will be charged as per usage. Even if they plan to add applications in the future, they will be able to do it hassle-free. It is a big win on cost advantage for such a large-scale deployment, ensuring scale and flexibility.