Meet Our Customer
Grow Credit is a FinTech company focused on helping consumers who have limited or no credit history to improve their credit score by using a virtual Mastercard to pay recurring monthly subscriptions for services such as Disney+, Netflix, Spotify, and more.
Challenge
Grow Credit needed to modernize its existing platform to be more stable and secure. They also needed to develop a data lake and build pipelines to enhance data analytics and leverage data science to solve business problems such as risk analysis and underwriting, all under a serious time crunch.
Overall, the company wanted to improve the customer experience while also enabling their internal team to leverage machine learning to mitigate risk and predict user behaviors. They needed an engineering partner who could help them build a new AWS infrastructure and application, as well develop a new data lake – and do it fast.
Vision
To expand their offering to enable millions of consumers to build their credit and provide them with a best-in-class user experience.
Implication
Quickly acquiring customers, and continually providing them with a best-in-class experience, are mandates for a startup organization like Grow Credit. If their online Mastercard application takes too long to load, prospects are likely to abandon the process altogether. And without a data lake, analysts can’t perform advanced data analytics and predict product usage patterns.
Solution
The Grow Credit team knew that NorthBay was the right choice to architect a highly available AWS-based infrastructure and application based on our certification as an AWS Premier Consulting Partner with 300+ AWS certified employees.
They were enthusiastic about the widely lauded NorthBay “One Team” model, whereby our team works hand-in-hand with client teams, so they have ample opportunity to learn from and actively engage with our experts. It’s NorthBay’s belief that only through knowledge sharing and mutual accountability can both NorthBay and our clients gain a shared sense of ownership. Additionally, this type of team structure better supports the agile development process needed to accelerate timeframes. Grow Credit also needed a partner who would take on ongoing management, operations and support services for both the infrastructure and the application post-deployment, which NorthBay is equipped to do.
AWS Services
Development
The joint team began by understanding the existing application and reviewing the existing code and functionality. Additionally, the team met with business stakeholders to clearly understand the vision and requirements for the product in order to build a product roadmap.
Northbay’s technical mission was to modernize Grow Credit’s platform from monolithic to containers, microservices and serverless, and build data pipelines and a data lake. The Grow Credit platform consists of a front-end web and mobile application for customers as well as back-end functionality. The team began by breaking out the services into their own microservices and began development on new features. The application data source was built using Amazon Aurora, and the services were implemented using AWS EKS and Fargate Clusters. All infrastructure was implemented as infrastructure as code.
To increase platform security, the team moved critical workloads to private subnets and integrated AWS WAF and AWS Secrets Manager services. Other AWS services including CloudWatch, Lambda, Route53, SNS, AWS Certificate Manager, AWS Config, IAM, SQS, CloudFront, KMS, AWS Client VPN, EFS, and ALB also were utilized in the re-engineered platform. The team also designed and implemented an advanced data lake for building machine learning models on customer data with the goal of increasing acquisition rates and driving customer lifetime value.
Operations
NorthBay is currently managing the business application and operations of Grow Credit AWS Cloud infrastructure (AWS IaaS) by providing operational/technical support, ensuring that all environments and systems components are up and running and available for all project-related activities, including those for development, QA and Production environment.
NorthBay is also providing performance monitoring services for the AWS infrastructure and applications using the AWS Native and 3rd party tools. Additionally, the team monitors monthly spending to ensure it is tracking to budget, and that any unused or underutilized resources are optimized accordingly.
Benefits
As a result of its partnership with NorthBay, Grow Credit was able to modernize the application architecture to make it more cloud-native resulting in scalability, reliability, and also cost savings. As the number of end-users are increasing, the NorthBay team is continuously working with the company to introduce new application features and mine customer data for business-building insights.
Next Steps
NorthBay will continue to work with the client to develop new features, build new integrations and provide production support services for the AWS infrastructure and application platform.
