OkCredit: Supporting SMBs through digitized bookkeeping and credit lending
About OkCredit
OkCredit is an Indian bookkeeping company for micro and small businesses in India. It helps merchants do credit account management by providing them with a digital platform to transact and keep record of payments accurately. Founded in 2017, OkCredit now serves more than 2.7 million customers every month.
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Contact usOkCredit empowers SMB growth by digitizing the bookkeeping process and providing credit lending with Google Cloud.
Google Cloud results
- Managing influx of logs with Google Kubernetes Engine
- Freeing up bottlenecks with asynchronous processing with Pub/Sub
- Automating databases to free up DevOps time
- Run analytics quickly for deep user insights with BigQuery
Supporting 50%+ year on year engagement growth with Google Cloud
In the more rural parts of India, it is common practice for residents to pick up groceries on credit, and only make payment for what they took at the end of every month. To keep a record, merchants often keep tabs manually by jotting them down in a notebook. This manual bookkeeping process of recording, tracking and closing credit transactions can be time-consuming, and often has a high margin of error.
This is what inspired co-founders Aditya Prasad, Harsh Pokharna and Gaurav Kumar to start OkCredit, a free account management software for small merchants. "Our goal is to empower the underserved small-medium businesses (SMBs) in tier two and three cities, by democratizing access to technology," explains Prasad, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer. Launched on a different cloud provider in 2017, OkCredit turned to Google Cloud in 2019 to fulfill its mission to catalyze growth for SMBs.
"A key issue we faced was stability, because everything was running in one machine. This was fine at first, but as the amount of logs we were producing daily began to increase, this single machine would fail. It got to a point where we couldn’t even log in to clear them out, and moving to Google Cloud solved this problem."
—Aditya Prasad, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, OkCreditScaling up the business with Google Cloud automation
Built from the ground up, OkCredit started on a very small scale. When Prasad and the team launched the first edition of the OkCredit app, they spent a lot of time building awareness and educating store owners about the app and its use case. Two years later, the number of users grew significantly, which meant that its initial setup became harder to maintain and scale. The company saw a 52% growth in engagement between 2020 and 2021, and by the end of 2021, the value of transactions recorded on the platform reached $50 billion.
Following the large increase in users, and the move to open new ecosystems for the app, the founders knew they needed a reliable partner that could support their growth. "A key issue we faced was stability, because everything was running in one machine. This was fine at first, but as the amount of logs we were producing daily began to increase, this single machine would fail," said Prasad. "It got to a point where we couldn’t even log in to clear them out, and moving to Google Cloud solved this problem." Since the logs were already running on containers, it made sense for OkCredit to deploy Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) as the shift was easy and seamless.
Before Google Cloud, asynchronous processing was done on RabbitMQ, an open-source messaging platform. To cope with the company’s fast growth, they moved to Pub/Sub as a solution to their scalability issues. For example, every time a transaction happens, the user would receive a message alerting them of that transaction. But with the high level of traffic, the messaging system sometimes fails. Pub/Sub is able to save and send the message later, something that RabbitMQ did not offer.
"In terms of infrastructure, we no longer have to manage a data center, which has cut down the amount of manpower needed quite significantly. On top of that, with Pub/Sub, all of our sequel jobs are managed automatically," says Prasad.
Now, the team relies heavily on Cloud SQL, so that they don’t have to host and manage the databases themselves, taking precious time off their DevOps team. Having an automated architecture gives OkCredit the opportunity to focus more on the platform’s use-cases so that they can continue to expand as a business, identifying new opportunities along the way.
Capturing previously unseen data for deeper insights
Even today, many businesses are dealing in cash, which means that there is no data around the inflow and outflow of money, and how they are allocated. With the OkCredit app, every transaction is recorded, providing unique data insights that can inform the company on business cash flow, which would in turn help them develop other features for merchants.
At OkCredit, Prasad says the data falls into two groups. The first being hard transactional data, where users make entries directly into the app, with the second being behavior data, that tracks the way users interact with the app. By first storing everything in Cloud Storage, analysts and data scientists can then run specific analytics on BigQuery.
"We have around one million heavily active small businesses engaging with us every week. We can now see the flow of money in this informal economy, something that was completely off-record before," says Prasad. "BigQuery is easy to use, so data scientists and analysts can key in what they need and get the results pretty quickly."
The company now processes large amounts of data points daily without any hiccups. "We’re creating software that acquires and engages users using engagement data that is generated to build an underwriting model, so that we can provide capital to merchants, which is one of the biggest needs right now," says Prasad. Using the data and insights we get from BigQuery, OkCredit is building a lending platform complete with underwriting services so that app users can grow their capital and have the means to scale their businesses.
"We have around one million heavily active small businesses engaging with us every week. We can now see the flow of money in this informal economy, something that was completely off-record before. BigQuery is easy to use, so data scientists and analysts can key in what they need and get the results pretty quickly."
—Aditya Prasad, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, OkCreditKeeping a secure, reliable database
As a platform that stores and manages financial data, OkCredit needs to ensure it has a strong layer of security across the application. "As a managed service that provides scheduled backups and recovery, Google Cloud gives us the assurance that our data will never be lost," says Prasad.
Furthermore, OkCredit can easily make its databases private so there are no public IPs for an added layer of security. By setting the filters to the level of security it requires, the company can still integrate its platform seamlessly with other open source platforms without worrying about security breaches.
Supporting SMBs with a solid, reliable infrastructure
From basic bookkeeping to running underwriting services and credit lending, OkCredit is well positioned to reach its goal of 60 million+ SMBs who are exploring digital business solutions. In fact, the company is extending loans to many businesses who have never received credit before, which means they are creating new opportunities that were previously not available to SMBs in smaller cities.
"With the support of Google Cloud, we are creating software for businesses which helps them in their operations. At the same time, we’re collecting data which informs us of how well businesses are doing, and what the gaps are, so that we can continue to build new software that fills those gaps," explains Prasad.
The company is and has always been clear about its mission, which is to become an enabler for the underserved market by helping businesses grow through technology. "Google Cloud manages the infrastructure for us, freeing up time so that we can focus on our users and build software that will continue to solve their problems," says Prasad.
"With the support of Google Cloud, we are creating software for businesses, which helps them in their operations. At the same time, we’re collecting data which informs us of how well businesses are doing, and what the gaps are, so that we can continue to build new software that fills those gaps."
—Aditya Prasad, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, OkCreditTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About OkCredit
OkCredit is an Indian bookkeeping company for micro and small businesses in India. It helps merchants do credit account management by providing them with a digital platform to transact and keep record of payments accurately. Founded in 2017, OkCredit now serves more than 2.7 million customers every month.