Cloud-Native System Optimization

Customer:

SME Finance is the largest non-banking fintech platform in the Baltic States. The company develops solutions based on artificial intelligence, with a strong focus on innovation in lending.

Overview
With the rapid growth of SME Finance and the creation of a unique ecosystem with a digital bank, SME Bank can offer fast and individually tailored solutions to the small and medium-sized business sector, which previously found it extremely difficult to obtain the necessary financing.
By connecting to the SME Finance platform, each client can receive all the required financing services in one place. If clients need banking services, they are referred to SME Bank – and if alternative financing services are required, they are referred to SME Finance. The system is based on AI solutions and allows each company to receive the most suitable solution. It is faster and more efficient, i.e., the company can receive financing in just one day
SME Finance chose Google Cloud Platform as a scalable and high-quality enabler of its growth ambitions.

The challenge
Adopting Cloud-based services reliably and cost-effectively requires a solid understanding of available options, detailed design of infrastructure architecture, choice of products that are best fit for purpose, and strong expertise in their implementation.
Upon successful implementation and the initial go-live of the service, its popularity started to grow while the cost and performance of the existing setup were becoming over time unacceptable for SME Finance. That alarming trend needed to be promptly addressed and resolved.
The solution
SME Finance decided to go back to the drawing board and review the existing solution in collaboration with TeraSky, from the perspective of applying best practices on scalable and cost-effective usage of Google Cloud Platform.
The whole system received thorough fine-tuning with eliminating unnecessary resource consumers and replacing sub-optimal parts of the setup in clusters based on Google Kubernetes Engine with the more cost-effective ones.

The results
The outcome of that effort was a reduction of resource consumption cost by 60% without having any negative impact on the quality of the service.
By following the best practices of Google Cloud adoption, SME Finance is now prepared for scaling up its operations further while keeping cost and maintenance effort under control.
„Cloud platforms present you with an abundance of different choices; understanding the vital capabilities of each area and what is the optimal combination for your unique situation is of critical importance to the successful implementation of these technologies. Reviewing the choices that we’ve made during the product launch and going through the comprehensive house-cleaning routine gave us another insight into the benefits and long-term positive effects of using Google Cloud Platform.“ Rolandas Tamasauskas, Chief Technology Officer, SME Finance.

About SME Finance
Lithuanian fintech SME Finance is currently the largest non-banking fintech platform in the Baltic States, which already provided financing for EUR 800M. The company develops solutions based on artificial intelligence, with a strong focus on innovation in lending. The mission of SME Finance is to help small and medium-sized businesses grow in the Baltic States and other European markets.
SME Finance works together in one ecosystem with the Neobank SME Bank, launched in June 2021. This unique ecosystem allows offering the best financing and day-to-day banking solutions for business. The SME Finance ecosystem provides loans, leasing, factoring, credit lines, payments, and other day-to-day banking services.
To this day, more than 2000 companies are SME Finance ecosystem customers. The most significant part of the portfolio – even 75% – consists of business loans (EUR 120M), factoring – 18% (EUR 28M), and leasing – 7% (EUR 12M).

Industry: Fintech, Banking
Primary project location: Lithuania

Products
Google Cloud Platform, GKE, Cloud SQL.