Toro boosts fintech investment platform with Oracle Cloud

Toro Investimentos is a fintech company that opened its own brokerage in 2018—the first fintech firm in Brazil to do so outside of large banks. In the past eight years it has grown 1,000X. Its team of analysts advises customers on investments, simplifying the process and enhancing customer experience with technology. Its educational and investment analysis platform has a million registered users. The company claims to be the first in the world to create a digital assistant based on interactive video and chatbot technology.

After the company’s launch in 2010, Toro’s database environment was completely on-premises. Over time it suffered from aging software, complexity, insufficient capacity for supporting the company’s phenomenal growth, as well as an inability to scale with the number of customers.

Eventually, Toro decided to stop investing time and resources in upgrading servers and networks and move to the cloud.

Toro examined cloud providers mostly from the point of view of availability and scalability, but cost was the decisive factor. “We went to Oracle Cloud to gain scalability and availability and to eliminate the effort, time, and cost of maintaining our environments. Compared to other cloud providers, Oracle was much more affordable,” says IT Manager Diego Couto.

Migrating to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) brought high availability of services, the ability to scale on demand, and the relief of not having to administer data centers.

The ability to scale, and thereby control CPU consumption, has been key for the company, which has experienced accelerated organic growth. “OCI gives us the security of knowing that we can scale quickly with almost zero downtime. It brings the serenity of being able to adapt quickly when a marketing campaign suddenly boosts business, for example,” says Derick Costa, database administrator at Toro Investimentos.

The company reduced its total cost of ownership by an estimated 20% by switching from Oracle Database to Oracle Enterprise Database Service. “As opposed to fixed license fees, the consumption-based subscription pricing allows us to spread the initial investment over many years. What’s more, we get higher availability, stronger database management, the security of the Oracle Cloud, and we can recover much faster in case of disaster,” says Couto.

Moving its workloads to OCI gave Toro access to OCI Kubernetes Engine (OKE). The Kubernetes cluster architecture helped Toro’s programmers, development teams, and operations engineers to create and manage new applications faster.

Along with scalability comes the lowest possible latency. By moving workloads to OCI, the investment teams provide real-time data flows, which make every market movement instantly available.

Toro previously hosted its production and disaster recovery environments in third-party data centers. Currently it is migrating critical workloads to Oracle’s Osasco cloud region. The company’s disaster recovery center will be located in Oracle’s Vinhedo cloud region, which provides continuous availability of up to 99.995%. Having two data centers in Brazil is advantageous for Toro because government data sovereignty regulations restrict the storage of financial data outside of the country.

The company’s backup and recovery processes are faster since adopting Oracle Enterprise Database Service. Previously, a complete backup of the on-premises database took about 4 hours, but OCI reduced the task to 45 to 60 minutes. And the delay for restore validation—testing the proper working of archiving, backup, and recovery procedures—has dropped from 90 minutes to only 18.