Unico Housing Finance (Unico), a new age digital housing finance company, has chosen Oracle Cloud as the foundation for its housing loan solutions and services that cater to the unbanked community in India. With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Oracle’s business and industry applications, Unico now has a stronger foundation to run its loan management faster and more efficiently, to empower aspiring homeowners get a step closer to owning their dream homes. Unico’s decision to move to the cloud reflects its dedication to implementing new solutions that can effectively meet the requirements of the affordable housing market in India.

Home ownership demand in India is on the rise with the home loan market expected to double in the next five years¹. Unico Housing Finance, registered with the Reserve Bank of India, was launched with the objective to provide affordable housing loan solutions and services to India’s unbanked and underserved communities. To further support this segment, Unico is planning to host its marketplace application on OCI that features service contractors for home construction projects.. To meet its mission, Unico needed cloud services designed to run any application, faster and more securely, for less. After evaluating several cloud options, Unico selected OCI in November 2023, for its superior performance, scalability, security, ability to adjust capacity based on demand and low cost.

“Homeownership has always been a huge priority and a matter of pride for Indians, yet there are very few avenues for the unbanked community to meet their housing needs. Unico was launched to bridge the social gap by meeting the credit needs of this undeserved segment, empowering them and fostering a sense of pride in homeownership," stated Babu Vellingiri, CEO, Unico Housing Finance. “We required a resilient, scalable, and secure platform to meet the increasing demand for housing loan solutions and services, and OCI emerged as the ideal choice. With its unparalleled combination of performance, cost-effectiveness, security, and scalability, OCI provided the perfect foundation. Additionally, Oracle Cloud Lift Services complemented our lean IT team with support in planning, architecting, prototyping, and managing our cloud migration, thereby accelerating our time to value.”

“With Oracle's solutions, we have created a new foundation for faster, more efficient loan management all running on the security and higher performance of OCI. This reflects Unico’s commitment to elevating the overall performance of its critical business applications, achieve heightened scalability, and streamline operational expenses,” he added.

Unico is also using several other OCI services to support its digital business ambitions. Oracle Base Database Service helps Unico achieve enhanced database performance which reduces their operational complexities and empowers efficient resource utilization, while Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse helps in data staging to eliminate cumbersome data backup tasks. Oracle Analytics Cloud will provide Unico a single and complete platform to help them source data from anywhere – across any environment, on any device – this will help them uncover business insights and increase productivity easily and cost effectively, The implementation of OCI Database with PostgreSQL, a top-tier managed service, boosts system resilience and performance, improves scalability of compute and storage. While providing Unico with enhanced data security with end-to-end encryption. The built-in intelligence of OCI Full Stack Disaster Recovery helps Unico generate disaster recovery plans tailored for Oracle Applications. Oracle Cloud Guard provides Unico with a unified view of cloud security posture across OCI and ensure that Unico’s security administrators have the visibility to triage and resolve cloud security issues.

A key reason for Unico to select Oracle was its full suite of capabilities – from cloud infrastructure to applications and industry solutions. In addition to OCI, Unico will also implement Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) to automate its financial management processes, accelerate reporting, expand insights, and improve controls. Running on OCI, Unico will also be using the loan management capabilities in Oracle FLEXCUBE and Oracle Banking Collections & Recovery to help speed loan origination, maintain all the critical documents and collateral associated with the individual loans, and support loan payment collection.

“Small and Medium-sized Businesses (SMBs) form the backbone of India’s economic landscape, making a substantial contribution to the country’s GDP. Oracle is dedicated to supporting the growth aspirations of this important business segment,” stated Shailender Kumar, senior vice president and regional managing director, Oracle India. "OCI will enable Unico to operate any applications faster and more securely in a cost-effective manner. OCI's offering of over 100 services will facilitate Unico in seamlessly migrating, modernizing, constructing, and scaling its IT infrastructure. Thus, enabling Unico to achieve its mission of turning home ownership aspirations of the underserved community into a reality.”

¹ SBI Research Ecowrap