Ualá accelerates the adoption of a data-driven culture with the help of Google Cloud
About Ualá
Ualá is a 100%-digital fintech that enables customers to manage funds through an easy-to-use application, providing its users with an innovative, agile, and secure experience.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact usThe company has enhanced resource management and strengthened cloud developments to offer users an agile and secure financial experience.
Google Cloud results
- Daily 100GB ingestion capacity
- Costs optimized by up to 50%
- More entities available in BigQuery
- 20% of Ualá's employees are already consuming data
Transforms analytics with a new data architecture
Founded in 2017, Ualá, a fintech operating in Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico, offers digital financial services, including digital payments, loan applications, investment solutions and collections, among other services.
The company's goal is to improve the financial lives of people in the region through an innovative ecosystem, providing easy-to-use, efficient, secure, and accessible products with a good IT performance.
Thanks to Ualá's speed and large data processing capacity, as well as the number of countries it operates in, it stands out in an increasingly demanding market.
Working with agility in mind
From its inception, Ualá had been operating its infrastructure in a cloud environment. As the company expanded, the team faced data computing and updating challenges, which exposed the need to change its architecture.
Given the abrupt digital acceleration in the region and an exponential growth in the company's traffic, Ualá needed to scale its services in record time, aided by a strategic partner that would support its needs.
The goal was clear: Offering an optimized experience, not only to users, but also to the teams behind the screen.
"User experience is defined by how and how well we get to know our users, and how effectively we manage that information to provide solutions and new digital experiences. An efficient, comprehensive, and scalable data journey allows us to democratize these user insights by making data securely accessible to everyone."
—Rodrigo Marini, Data Engineering Manager, UaláSolutions that exceed expectations
As Ualá had decided to expand its path to a data-driven culture, it reached out to the Google Cloud team to start migrating its systems together.
After assessing various tools, the company chose BigQuery, an advanced, ML-based data warehouse, with low maintenance requirements and an invaluable elastic capacity to scale data processing to the next level.
Throughout this new journey with Google Cloud, the company leveraged a variety of additional tools, including Cloud Composer, to author, schedule, and monitor large workflows; Cloud Storage, to store unstructured data; Cloud Functions, to aid operations, from production to entity availability; and Data Catalog, to tag data entries within BigQuery. Cloud Data Loss Prevention was also incorporated to classify and protect sensitive information.
Thanks to Google Kubernetes Engine, Ualá can now manage large data volumes. With Cloud Run, developers can focus on developing data solutions and spend less time operating, configuring, and scaling the infrastructure.
Google Cloud's suite of solutions provided Ualá with the necessary tools to adapt to a challenging market, with positive projections in the short, medium, and long term.
More data, more benefits
Ualá deployed its new architecture at unmatched speed. The company kicked-off the migration in January 2022 and reached its first production environment in April 2022.
In Google Cloud's solutions Ualá found a highly reliable storage service and managed to reduce processing times and optimize costs by up to 50%. New analysis and business models were implemented to support the company's decision-making.
For the Data Engineering team, this implied not only offering an easy-to-use platform but also expanding the company's business vision, crafting solutions, and overcoming even larger technical challenges, such as the development of Ualá Score, a credit engine holding tens of millions of data.
This new architecture design consolidated the basis for an agile, flexible, and exponentially scalable environment, as the company has obtained record-breaking growth.
"We are a large company and teamwork is key. I believe our trust in the Google Cloud team was based on 100% transparency right from the very start. That helps accelerate things."
—Pablo Guzzi, Chief Data & Analytics Officer, UaláThe future of data lies in the cloud
Google Cloud's constant communication and support are crucial for leveraging the full potential of the company's current architecture. From now on, Ualá is planning to optimize and drive the use of the adopted solutions to continue its data development journey.
Apart from increasing its computing capacity to approximately 100GB per day, the company succeeded in incorporating business teams that have made data consumption part of their routines, which was unthinkable a few months ago. They can now leverage data to drive engagement within the platform. Today, 20% of Ualá's employees are already consuming data.
Even with these remarkable results, Ualá will continue working to further consolidate the foundations of its data culture, by implementing self-service analytics tools across the company, with the intention of increasing agility and scalability.
"Our aim is to be disruptive and shake things up in terms of data management at Ualá. Google Cloud's team can help us meet the goals we set from now on."
—Rodrigo Marini, Data Engineering Manager, UaláTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Ualá
Ualá is a 100%-digital fintech that enables customers to manage funds through an easy-to-use application, providing its users with an innovative, agile, and secure experience.