LOLC Group modernizes core applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

LOLC Group is a Sri Lankan conglomerate with businesses that include financial services, insurance, agriculture, renewable energy, hotels, manufacturing, and construction. Its LOLC Finance unit is the country’s largest non-banking financial institution, offering a range of services to consumers and businesses.

The financial company’s footprint in Sri Lanka spans every district, from the rural hinterlands to major cities. It has formed partnerships with financial and developmental organizations in countries across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and other regions. LOLC Finance’s mission is to empower people and communities and enable economic progress.

At the core of LOLC Finance’s business was a 20-year-old on-premises application, custom-built on Oracle Forms, with modules that manage savings accounts, process loans, onboard customers, lease vehicles, provide microfinancing—and even root out money laundering. That application’s monolithic architecture not only slowed down development, but also rendered the app unusable in certain countries due to local laws and regulations.

To pave the way for its international expansion, LOLC Finance needed to decouple those modules using microservices, letting the company turn on specific application features and turn off others as needed. That architecture would also make it easy for developers to add new features.

The LOLC Finance IT team decided to rebuild its application with Java, Spring Boot, and React and move it to a cloud native composable architecture, mainly to take advantage of the cloud’s scalability, pay-as-you-go pricing, and ability to iterate applications more easily.

The company selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Autonomous Database due to LOLC’s existing Oracle investments, OCI’s reliability, and Oracle’s superior customer service and pricing.

Among the OCI-based services the company adopted are OCI Kubernetes Engine (OKE) for running microservices at scale using Docker containers; Oracle Streaming Service for Kafka-compatible event-based messaging between microservices; OCI Load Balancing, OCI Compute, OCI API Gateway, and Oracle Functions; Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing, the underlying self-provisioning, self-managing, self-patching database; Oracle MySQL Database Service for quality assurance and user-acceptance testing environments; and Oracle Data Safe for data security.

The conglomerate moved its core application to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in just six months, well ahead of schedule, modernizing the app’s architecture and relying on Oracle to help the company evolve its DevOps processes.

OCI’s global footprint and the application’s flexible architecture are enabling the company to expand easily into new countries, such as Zambia and Pakistan, whose banking and finance regulations required app customizations. Also, the uptime and reliability of OCI was another key benefit. The company found that the price-performance of OCI surpasses that of competing offerings it evaluated.

LOLC uses Oracle Data Safe to manage the day-to-day security of the data in Oracle Cloud databases, helping to reduce risk and improve security.

LOLC Technologies, a leading Oracle partner in Sri Lanka, provides business services to clients both domestically and globally. LOLC Technologies is the official partner for LOLC Group to modernize core applications on Oracle Cloud.