Instacredit is a finance company that began operations in Costa Rica on April 26, 2000, with 23 employees, 3 branches, and a portfolio acquired from the former multinational “Servicios de Crédito Asociados de Costa Rica.”
More than 22 years later, the group now has more than 1,050 employees and 57 branches across Costa Rica, Panama, Nicaragua, and El Salvador.
Instacredit offers a broad portfolio of immediate, easy-to-access financial solutions designed to help clients improve their quality of life through personalized service. Its offerings include microloans, secured loans, and loans for SMEs.
“Beginning a journey toward innovation and the cutting edge” is the phrase that sums up Instacredit's main need when it chose to start its transformation journey alongside IVCISA and Amazon Web Services cloud solutions.
As a financial institution with a presence in several countries, Instacredit set its sights on success and looked for alternatives that would let it chart a roadmap toward Machine Learning and help it improve its information processing, with the goal of making the most of its data.
Having clear objectives allowed Instacredit to begin the search for the right partner to accompany it on this innovation journey and help it absorb the knowledge needed to follow the path it had set. That is how IVCISA, as a partner specialized in AWS solutions, became the strategic collaborator Grupo Instacredit was looking for.
The group's main challenges can be summarized in two points. First, Instacredit wanted to move to the technological forefront; second, it wanted to improve the processing of the data it generated and leverage it in decision-making.
With this, the company sought to minimize the risks present in its most important niches—especially collections—where it needed to understand, from the outset, how a prospective client would repay a loan. All of this analysis drove its innovation agenda.
As Elkin Higuera A., Director of Information Technology at Instacredit, noted at the time, the company had in-house developments with decision engines built internally. However, it did not have a proper machine-learning solution.
With the challenges analyzed and the partner selected, Instacredit began its Data Lake and Machine Learning project alongside IVCISA as the specialized partner that would guide it on its innovation journey and provide the knowledge needed to carry the process forward internally.
“The knowledge transfer in every project is the greatest added value we have gained from IVCISA.”
With IVCISA's support, Instacredit not only deployed a Data Lake and Machine Learning service on AWS, but IVCISA also helped the data team innovate and create good data practices, consolidate information, and improve the usability of ETL processes and the data catalog.
They became pioneers in data-access management within the organization and were able to continue with a methodology for ingesting and processing data across the organization's various areas.
As a specialized AWS partner, IVCISA supported them in establishing best practices for development environments, and security measures were incorporated into the AWS ecosystem.
Among the services Grupo Instacredit uses are:
“Communication with IVCISA has always been smooth. I liked the working methodology; when they pitched the idea, it wasn't a turnkey ‘here, it's done’ approach—it was a collaborative effort.”
