Guru: More savings and enhanced customer experience with Google Cloud
About Guru
Guru is a fintech company operating in the investment market. Striving to offer the best IT and design experience to its clients, its mission is to turn all Brazilians into investors using an easy-to-use and intuitive app.
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Contact usAfter migrating fully to the platform, the fintech managed to optimize its resources and become more streamlined and cost-efficient by using managed cloud-based solutions.
Google Cloud results
- Rate of deliveries to the production environment rose ~150%
- 1.7 million monthly API requests by customers to Guru services
- 139 milliseconds, on average, to deliver the fintech's app requests with Cloud Functions
- 99.9% of users have never experienced issues in the Guru app
- 0.06% error rate in Guru services
60% cost reduction and more productivity
Guru is a fintech company based in São Paulo that provides its customers with an easy-to-use, intuitive application for investing in the stock market. Through its app, customers can buy and sell shares, real estate funds, BDRs, and cryptocurrencies in just three clicks.
As an alternative to traditional brokers and cumbersome, inconvenient financial apps, Guru is an ideal option for investors requiring simple, practical, and user-friendly tools with investment data right at their fingertips. The company also offers automated investment portfolios, which makes it easier for users with tight schedules or barely any investment knowledge.
To provide a top-quality experience to its target audience, Guru initially planned a multi-cloud IT environment, partly using Google Cloud and partly using another service provider.
The most important challenge has always been to match data volumes in the financial market with customers' expectations to access all this data in real time. Millions of transactions are performed per minute, and any issue in this process may lead to inaccurate information, and ultimately to significant customer losses.
After three years operating in a multi-cloud environment, the fintech company noticed that Google Cloud had become a strategic ally in solving both IT and business challenges.
"We decided to kick off a feasibility study, and then realized that Google Cloud solutions really made sense. We were drawn by all the tools to explore and also by the value we could obtain from adopting them. Several meetings later, we chose the best path for us."
—Tom Bernardes, Co-Founder & CTO, GuruA new platform for a more flexible infrastructure
The company relied on Google Cloud's technical support team in each step of the migration process. Engineers worked together with the fintech's professionals, aligning their expertise with Guru's business decisions. Conversations and negotiations had started by the end of 2022, but the migration process kicked off in April 2023, lasting just over a month.
Today, one of the main services the company uses is Cloud Functions, enabling almost 98% of the applications to run on a serverless basis. This solution is supported by a cache memory layer created with Memorystore, which receives container-based application data from Google Kubernetes Engine.
Following this structure, Cloud Functions delivers all requests made by Guru's application within 139 milliseconds, on average. The fintech also uses Cloud SQL for database management and BigQuery as its data warehouse.
"Google Cloud solutions have proved to be a perfect fit for our needs, as we managed to redesign our entire IT architecture with no issues, making all the necessary adjustments and changes for our business. Cloud Functions has certainly been the star, and it has become the heart of our app."
—Tom Bernardes, Co-Founder & CTO, GuruResults that prove the strategy was the right move
Today, Guru has over 18,000 open accounts and 30,000 monthly active users in its app. It also receives 1.7 million API requests made by customers to its services every month. Centralizing the company's environment into Google Cloud led to a service error rate of just 0.06%, meaning that 99.9% of users have never faced an issue when using Guru's app.
The use of managed solutions further streamlined the activities of product and development teams. As professionals no longer need to waste time checking tool maintenance and availability, they can agree on and move forward with new features.
"After migrating to Google Cloud, we managed to reduce cloud costs by over 60% only by optimizing our resources. Thanks to resource integration, and especially Cloud Functions, our rate of deliveries to the production environment rose by 150%."
—Tom Bernardes, Co-Founder & CTO, GuruReviews in app stores are one of the indicators that showed the highest level of improvement in terms of customer experience. Guru's app was rated 4.6 in Google Play and 4.8 in Apple's App Store. In the future, the company intends to continue evolving and searching for better results, including by expanding the use of Google Cloud solutions and other deployments.
"Some projects are already ongoing; for example, we are now getting much more consolidated data through Looker and BigQuery. Although the project is in its early stages, we're also assessing how we can use artificial intelligence to further evolve and bring value to the business," adds Lucas Amorim, Guru's Cloud Consultant.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Guru
Guru is a fintech company operating in the investment market. Striving to offer the best IT and design experience to its clients, its mission is to turn all Brazilians into investors using an easy-to-use and intuitive app.