CRIF scores high on business continuity and security with Oracle Cloud
The credit bureau moved critical apps to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to make split-second customer credit rating queries and strengthen disaster recovery.
“Our business-critical apps are our bread and butter. If our primary site goes down, we’ll be out of business. We wanted a reliable solution and partner like Oracle with whom we can grow and innovate.”
Desafios comerciais
CRIF High Mark is a global full-service credit information bureau that serves a range of borrowers, including small- and medium-size businesses and microfinance organizations across four continents. In India in 2011, CRIF pioneered the first microfinance bureau database, which today has grown to be the world’s largest.
As a credit bureau, CRIF shoulders an enormous responsibility. Lenders such as banks, retailers, and microfinance organizations depend on it for timely and accurate credit information to assess the credit-worthiness of would-be borrowers. The organization is bound by service agreements under which 99% of its customers expect response to their inquiries within three seconds.
As customer demand surged, CRIF’s on-premises systems couldn’t easily scale. This hampered the company’s capacity and forecast planning, making servicing customers on time and meeting service-level agreements (SLAs) difficult. Every time CRIF wanted to add capacity, it had to provision new servers, storage, and data center co-location space, and deal with the ensuing downtime.
CRIF is a regulated company and must adhere to Reserve Bank of India (RBI) requirements. With Oracle Cloud, the primary site and disaster recovery site configuration have been updated, because it is crucial to business.
Our Indian entity is handling very high volume of inquiries in a day, the largest volume of transactions across our entities globally, thanks to Oracle. This is something our global teams want to emulate.
Why CRIF Chose Oracle
CRIF was running its entire credit bureau app—the most essential part of its business—on Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle Exadata on premises.
The company wanted a cloud provider with a scalable, reliable, secure and like-for-like infrastructure to keep up with customer demands, adhere to SLAs, and help it remain compliant with RBI regulations.
CRIF decided to move its DR infrastructure to Exadata Cloud Service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Compared to the company’s on-premises environment, CRIF was surprised that Oracle Cloud was able to process more volume faster and add capacity on demand. It gave business leaders confidence that the IT infrastructure could handle enormous volume while meeting requirements for fast response.
Furthermore, CRIF was impressed with Oracle’s ability to provide universal credits. This gave the company the flexibility to use what it needed and switch off applications that weren’t required to run continuously, allowing the company to use the costs saved elsewhere.
CRIF evaluated other players in market and decided to use OCI for costs savings and be compliant to RBI’s strict regulatory requirements.
Resultados
CRIF’s implementation of Oracle Cloud applications allowed it to save 30% in infrastructure costs over three years. It was also able to reduce the staff needed for capacity planning and demand forecasting by 40%.
CRIF India processes Very high volume of inquiries a day. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure enables CRIF to scale as needed, resulting in better performance. OCI also let CRIF reduce the time to deliver projects by 95%, down from three to four months with on-premises systems. Now CRIF can get to market faster.
CRIF also liked the fact that with OCI, it gets access to Oracle PaaS where it can pick and choose products and services from Oracle and other providers. Using Oracle Cloud, CRIF is testing new opportunities with analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to get a step closer to achieving its digital transformation goals.
“Apart from flexibility, agility, scalability, and security, the other compelling factor to go with Oracle was that I don't have to buy licenses. I don't have to invest up front,” says Pinkes Ambvat, CIO, CRIF India.