Enhances data processing efficiency by 9x through Vertex AI automation
Realizes 99% accuracy rate in product identification for data analytics
Supports continuous data input and processing with highly available database in Cloud SQL
Enables agile and stable software update deployment with cloud infrastructure powered by Google Kubernetes Engine
Leverages Google Cloud to automate data cleaning and deploy its FinTech services, invos Group is able to provide more instant data insights to offline retailers while ensuring reliable, compliant data processing and storage.
Leverages Google Cloud to automate data cleaning and deploy its FinTech services, invos Group is able to provide more instant data insights to offline retailers while ensuring reliable, compliant data processing and storage.
Automating data cleaning with AI
With data services provided by major global platforms, retail brands can now easily and quickly analyze consumer behavior online. However, to come up with comprehensive marketing strategies, they still need to understand their customers’ behavior offline, where there is still limited visibility due to a lack of efficient data collection and processing mechanisms.
invos Group is set to address this pain point. Its mobile application, invos, is one of the most popular receipt storage tools in Taiwan, with more than 8.5 million member users. As collecting electronic purchase receipts is a common practice encouraged by the government’s policy and a lottery-like scheme in the country, invos Group possesses a huge database of offline sales records that can generate useful insights for retail brands.
“We’ve been providing electronic receipt storing and tracking services since 2018, which allows us to accumulate four billion entries of receipt data from offline retail sales,” notes Aaron Chen, CEO at invos Group. “By analyzing this huge amount of data, we can help enterprise customers better understand consumer behavior across physical stores.”
We’ve been leveraging the cloud infrastructure of Google Cloud since 2012 for its high flexibility and full compliance with the Taiwanese regulations on financial data. It was an obvious choice for us when we needed AI tools to automate data processing.
Aaron Chen
CEO, invos Group
Processing receipt data coming from various shops and point-of-sale systems is a challenge because a product is often registered under hundreds of different names. When invos Group first started providing data insight services, it relied on data labelers to manually identify and tag data, which required substantial time and effort. To expedite the data cleaning process, the team in 2024 opted to utilize the artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities of Google Cloud, where it had been deploying its applications for over a decade.
9x higher analytics efficiency powered by Vertex AI
Following the technical advice of iKala, a Google Cloud partner in Taiwan, invos Group expanded its use of Google Cloud from infrastructure to AI solutions. Joe Wang, CTO at invos Group, explained that the partnership with iKala is particularly beneficial, because it not only provides invoicing and troubleshooting support, but also actively participates in technical discussions to find the best solutions for invos Group’s use cases.
Before adopting Vertex AI, it often took us 45 workdays to complete a consumption insights report through traditional market research methods. With Vertex AI, we’re able to deliver complete analytics results within five days.
Aaron Chen
CEO, invos Group
“The close collaboration between iKala and Google Cloud is one of the main reasons why we chose iKala as our long-term partner. By connecting us with the Google Cloud engineers and sharing know-how, iKala has helped ensure that we’re using the Google Cloud tools in the most effective way,” he adds.
Now, invos Group leverages Vertex AI to automatically identify products in its receipt data, resulting in higher accuracy and efficiency. The company’s internal tests show that Vertex AI can successfully recognize product names in abbreviations or with typos at a 99% accuracy rate, which is higher than when it was done by humans. Meanwhile, since the time required for data cleaning has been greatly shortened, data insights can be generated 9x faster.
Enabling reliable data processing and software update deployment
invos Group’s app ingests receipt data around the clock. To ensure uninterrupted data input and processing, invos Group utilizes Cloud SQL as its core database. As the flexible, fully-managed data storage architecture of Cloud SQL enables high availability, invos Group’s DevOps team can easily maintain the continuity of its data flow and spend more time on broadening data analytics use scenarios and optimizing its AI models.
Furthermore, invos Group deploys all its FinTech and MarTech services in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). It can therefore leverage open-source management tools designed for Kubernetes, like Terraform and Argo CD, to standardize its deployment process through the Infrastructure as Code practice. By using code instead of a manual interface, the team is able to minimize human errors and release software updates more smoothly.
“The infrastructure tools of Google Cloud like Cloud SQL and GKE have helped us ensure the reliability and consistency of our services rather effortlessly,” notes Wang. “Since we need to process data 24/7 and constantly update our software, having a powerful, easy-to-manage cloud infrastructure is definitely a great plus.”
Moving forward, invos Group plans to expand its use of Google Cloud's AI solutions to provide innovative features and enhance the productivity of its DevOps team. For example, it is currently developing a new AI-powered feature that can automatically compare the prices of a product across all sales channels and recommend to users the most economical option. The FinTech company also expects to boost its software development productivity by five times through handing over basic and repetitive tasks to generative AI.
Having seen the exponential improvement that the AI tools of Google Cloud have brought to our data workflow, we’re convinced that by broadening our use case scenarios, we’re able to achieve more with AI.
Aaron Chen
CEO, invos Group
invos Group is dedicated to connecting brands and consumers with its expertise in FinTech and MarTech. Providing accurate sales insights through big data and AI, invos Group offers software services to both enterprises and general users.
Industry: Financial Services
Location: Taiwan
Products: Google Cloud, Cloud SQL, Google Kubernetes Engine, Vertex AI
About Google Cloud partner — iKala
iKala is a Taiwanese digitalization and AI commerce solution provider founded in 2011. Its subsidiary iKala Cloud is a Google Cloud partner offering consultation services and has served more than 400 enterprise customers in Asia Pacific for their use of Google Cloud.
