FINDEP: Mobility, Efficiency and Collaborative Work in Google Cloud

About Financiera Independencia

Financiera Independencia (FINDEP) was organized in 1993 and was Mexico’s first Limited Purpose Financial Institution, pioneering the granting of personal microcredits. Nowadays, FINDEP is a consolidated company with over 25 years of experience doing business under a single diversified model, with 10,000 collaborators and almost 1 million customers.

Industries: Financial Services & Insurance
Location: Mexico

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About Transtelco

Transtelco offers business network and high-performance Carrier services to national and international companies. Its scalable and transparent network architecture allows for the customization of company services and assets to adapt them to different business needs, sharing resources and capabilities in metropolitan, national and transnational networks. It manages all aspects of the company's service, including network installation, servicing, monitoring and management.

Google enabled the digital transformation of the company, as it offers many readymade solutions allowing for a much more effective time to market.

Google Cloud Results

  • FINDEP has uploaded almost 2 billion records to BigQuery.
  • The company’s mobility increased to 7,000 mobile desks.
  • FINDEP can deploy a new server in only 5 minutes.
  • Its performance with only 1 or 2 CPUs is better than it used to be with 4 CPUs.
  • Backing up data now takes 10 minutes instead of a whole day.
  • It now operates 24/7 instead of only operating from Monday through Saturday.
  • With Vision API, it was able to classify all of the images in its files in one month, instead of having 2,000 people reviewing one file at a time for 6 months to 1 year.

Cost savings for 4-5 million dollars a year.

Financiera Independencia (FINDEP) was organized in 1993 and was Mexico’s first Limited Purpose Financial Institution, pioneering the granting of personal microcredits. Nowadays, FINDEP is a consolidated company with over 25 years of experience doing business under a single diversified model, with 10,000 collaborators and almost 1 million customers. It has 600 branches in Mexico alone.

FINDEP is a group comprised by 6 financial institutions, 4 of which are based in Mexico. The other two are based one in the US and one Brazil. This financial institution stands out for its physical presence, commercial team and collection team, which, in Mexico alone, comprises over 8,000 collection agents providing customized services to its customers.

The Beginning of Digital Transformation

FINDEP undertook to carry out a digital transformation within the company, which spawned various challenges, as one of the company’s unique characteristics is the fact that it handles large amounts of cash because its target customers do not usually hire banking services. Thus, it needed to find the best way to get the cash to customers without them having to physically go to a specific branch. Mobile devices and websites would be key to the process. Moreover, in order to meet its business goals, the company needed links to handle large volumes of data, low latency levels and high availability.

To securely and efficiently offer top services to its customers, the company had to raise awareness among its collaborators of the functionalities and multiple benefits to be gained by adopting cloud services, as many of them believed this technology only worked for startups.

It was in 2015 that FINDEP decided to contact Google and Transtelco to embark on a deep digital transformation and start the business and data migration, previously hosted in physical servers at the company’s offices, to Google Cloud. They used the various tools offered by Google Cloud Platform, such as G Suite and BigQuery, to simplify their processes and have a greater control over customers’ sensitive information.

Digitalization, Mobility and Collaborative Work

The first step towards achieving this goal was testing some mobile apps to showcase their benefits. These were successful and earned not only customers’ trust, because of their great performance, but also officers’ trust, as they reduced costs by USD 4-5 million a year.

Full migration of the entire data center, data lake and legacy system of the international company took little over a year. The company uploaded a total of almost 2 billion records to BigQuery, including both structured data (tables or fields) and unstructured data (digital files, pictures of houses, call center recordings, etc.)

Information security and protection are paramount to companies in this industry. That is why the IT developments offered by Google laid solid foundations for FINDEP’s growth. Moreover, remote teamwork is no longer a problem for FINDEP, as G Suite allows multiple persons to work on a single document simultaneously in real time.

One of Google Cloud Platform’s main tools, regularly used by the company, is Firebase, which allows mobile apps used by vendors and collection managers to work offline, so they can work from their mobile devices and access the required information even if they have no phone or data signal.

Great Results with Great Tools

The digital transformation undergone by FINDEP translated into amazing internal and external benefits for the company. Tools were immediately adopted, creating a collaborative environment that allowed for a better use of data.

“The main benefit is the amazing surge in collaboration thanks to G Suite. Google Cloud also improved the performance of our system and allowed for the democratization of data so that any person can access them,”

José Pérez de Acha, FINDEP’s Corporate Fintech Director.

Google enabled the digital transformation of the company, as it offers many readymade solutions allowing for a much more effective time to market. In the past, enabling the mobility of the entire company was unthinkable. Nowadays, there are over 7,000 mobile desks in use. Infrastructural limitations disappeared and FINDEP now has the ability to deploy a new server in only 5 minutes.

In turn, BigQuery allowed FINDEP to easily search and organize customer information, by centralizing data storage: contracts, payments, restructurings, collection actions, applications, information on human resources, accounting records; everything from the first credit granted 25 years ago to the latest one.

“We achieved a higher performance with much smaller servers. Before, we needed a computer with 4 CPUs, but with the deployment of Google Cloud we noticed we only needed 1 or 2 CPUs to achieve higher performance,”

José Pérez de Acha, FINDEP’s Corporate Fintech Director.

FINDEP now devotes only 3 employees, instead of 10, to managing the entire IT infrastructure of all the financial institutions. Additionally, the adoption of Google Cloud Platform allowed the company to extend its operations. The company did not operate on Sundays, but now it works 24/7.

The cloud system has shifted the data backup paradigm. FINDEP just takes snapshots of all its folders and these are stored automatically. Before using Google Cloud Platform, the company needed one day to backup all its databases, servers, binaries, etc. Now, this takes only 10 minutes. Upon system failure or downtime, the information is restored in only 10 minutes.

There is still much to learn about the potential of Google Cloud tools for FINDEP, especially in the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The company has begun conducting tests with Vision API to authenticate IDs – National Electoral Institute, proofs of domicile, proofs of entry – in customer files. The results have been very positive: in just one month, the company was able to classify all of the images in its files, instead of having 2,000 people reviewing one file at a time for 6 months to 1 year. Now, every time a document is uploaded, the customer’s ID and remaining data identified are indexed automatically.

Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.

Contact us

About Financiera Independencia

Financiera Independencia (FINDEP) was organized in 1993 and was Mexico’s first Limited Purpose Financial Institution, pioneering the granting of personal microcredits. Nowadays, FINDEP is a consolidated company with over 25 years of experience doing business under a single diversified model, with 10,000 collaborators and almost 1 million customers.

Industries: Financial Services & Insurance
Location: Mexico

About Transtelco

Transtelco offers business network and high-performance Carrier services to national and international companies. Its scalable and transparent network architecture allows for the customization of company services and assets to adapt them to different business needs, sharing resources and capabilities in metropolitan, national and transnational networks. It manages all aspects of the company's service, including network installation, servicing, monitoring and management.