Challenge
Provu is one of the most prominent personal credit fintechs today. Since the beginning of its operations, the creditor has made more than R$500 million in loans to more than 60,000 customers on its online platform, in addition to promoting innovative actions in the Brazilian market, such as:
- Provu Parcelado, which provides electronic credit access to tens of thousands of consumers in partnership with more than 3,500 e-commerces;
- 100% online loan application process, with personalized interest rates and deposits that can occur on the same day;
- the use of technology and intelligence for analysis that goes beyond the traditional market score, bringing opportunities to an even wider range of people.
However, securing fair interest rates while evolving and innovating is a challenge. At Provu, the amount of workloads and resources managed has affected operations by:
- creating bureaucracy and complexity in operational processes;
- compromising application performance; and
- generating unnecessary costs with cloud providers.
Another obstacle for Provu was the low performance of content delivery network (CDN) solutions in regions such as the North and Northeast, where a large percentage of their customers are concentrated and latency rates are the highest in Brazil[1].
After analyzing the market, Provu got to know Azion’s Edge Computing Platform, relying on Azion’s:
- high processing capacity, which is up to 30x faster than cloud solutions[2];
- wide coverage in Brazil, with more than 40 points of presence across the country; and
- range of edge-based products that help Provu prepare for the future.
With the Azion Platform, Provu now has essential resources to improve the performance and security of its application, even in hostile network structures, one of the main challenges for its growth in Brazil.
Solution
Drastically reducing latency is one of the main reasons organizations move to the edge[3]. Provu was no different. The company adopted several native edge solutions from Azion, such as:
- Edge Functions: allows the Provu team of developers to run event-driven serverless applications on the edge closest to each user;
- Application Acceleration: improves the performance of Provu’s applications and APIs (application programming interfaces) by optimizing protocols and building advanced request and response rules;
- Edge Cache: accelerates the delivery of Provu’s content, keeping it cached on the edge according to their needs and preferences; and
- Edge Firewall: enables Provu to create access control rules and protect their applications against top 10 OWASP threats and sophisticated zero-day attacks.
At the beginning of their partnership with Azion, Provu ran only their website flow and external APIs on Azion’s Edge. Later, their team of experts began to reformulate Provu’s internal architecture, which involved:
- migrating applications to a microservice-oriented architecture;
- moving all applications to the edge; and
- creating a single point of entry and exit for data to isolate databases and source applications.
Migrating to Azion allowed Provu to reduce the amount of services they use from their cloud provider and, consequently, reduce the costs that these operations generate.
By exploring the programmable characteristics of the Azion Platform, Provu integrated the management of Azion’s edge resources into its own systems via API. This simplification added agility to the processes, strengthening their DevOps culture and providing gains in operational efficiency.
Results and Impact
Provu drastically reduced the workloads processed by its cloud provider by building more than 70 edge applications with Azion. Since then, the performance, security, and innovation gains increase every day, leading the company to save 40% per year on its cloud services.
In the Northeast region of Brazil, where Provu’s old solution performed poorly, the speed of Provu’s applications improved more than 80% when requests were delivered at Azion’s Edge Locations.
Managing time is one of the five biggest challenges that developers face [4]. By simplifying the management of their hundreds of microservices, developers have more autonomy to perform tests and implement code directly on the edge.
Using Network Layer Protection to manage IP (Internet Protocol) addresses from Azion’s Network Lists, Provu simplified the process of releasing its partners to access internal pages, a task that previously generated enormous costs in man hours. Now the process is done automatically and safely through allowlists.
During all stages of their partnership, Azion specialists were available to assist Provu in implementing ideas, security, and events. The result was a strengthened relationship and increasingly sophisticated and innovative projects.
“Our content distribution network was focused on caching and distribution, and we did not have the objective of expanding our use of microservices and security until we learned about the features and programmability of Azion’s Edge Platform and its various points of presence in Brazil.”
Marcelo Negrini, CTO of Provu
About Provu
Since 2015 revolutionizing access to credit, Provu is a finance company with fully digital services that lives Brazil and the dream of Brazilians. The company has a human vocation, sees the needs and understands the desires of each person, with the purpose of supporting Brazilians with solutions to make plans, get out of expensive debt and have purchasing power. Provu appeared under the name of Lendico, but in 2021 it changed brands due to a strategic decision to reposition and expand the reach of financial products. With this transformation, we bring a new concept, with the premise of offering more solutions to Brazilians while maintaining Lendico’s efficiency, reputation and history. We have already helped more than 90,000 Brazilians to fulfill dreams and reorganize their financial lives, lending more than R$750 million. And you can also count on us to leverage your purpose with smart, fair and personalized credit!