Additional reporting by Nathaniel Fetalvero

Indonesia-based peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platform Investree was founded in 2015 when co-founder and CEO Adrian Gunadi saw the potential for P2P lending to fill the “huge credit gap that was not being met by formal sectors.”

At its launch, the startup began offering invoice financing solutions for small businesses, which allows these firms to receive advance payment from retail lenders for their services, while they wait for their clients or customers to pay them.

Now, five years since its founding, Investree has expanded its suite of financial services to include buyer financing, online seller financing, and working capital term loans. It has also since expanded into the Philippines and Thailand.

Growing challenges

As the company started to scale, it had to make sure that its growth didn’t come at the cost of its platform’s stability.

“Being a P2P lending platform, we need our system to be very stable, reliable, and have minimal to no downtime,” says Investree chief technology officer Daniel Armanto. That being the case, the company needed to work with a cloud provider that was agile enough to help it deliver more without sacrificing quality.

On top of this, Investree’s needs as a scaling business were growing as well. That meant newer functions had to be available to employees, while the team worked on offering fresh features for consumers.

“As we looked to grow bigger, faster, and more sustainable, our business team had an increased need for real-time data analytics to help them make decisions on the fly, as well as deliver reports and analysis,” says chief information officer Dickie Widjaja.

This led the team to cloud technology service provider Alibaba Cloud. After several rounds of proof of concepts and tests to ensure it was comfortable enough with the company’s wide range of services, Investree moved its data warehouse and analytics processes onto Alibaba Cloud’s platform.

According to Armanto, one big factor that helped in making the decision to move to Alibaba Cloud was the fact that it allowed the development team to focus on building new products.

“We don’t need to worry in maintaining, monitoring, or even scaling the service – we just use it,” he says. “If we need more resources, we just spin out another resource. If we need to have more performance, then we can tune or tweak some parameters within the dashboard without some team members having to deep dive or really understand the real problem.”

Thriving in adversity

On top of enabling Investree to grow smoothly, Alibaba Cloud’s services, Widjaja says, was one of the reasons the startup was able to survive amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

“If you want to survive, let alone thrive, you have to be more effective and efficient in all aspects of your operations,” he says. “One giant step to achieve that was robust analytics operations.”

Companies like Investree, according to Widjaja, need to have agile and scalable systems that support their current analytical needs – and any needs they might have in the future. However, he also urges companies to keep their customers’ changing needs in mind.

“All these innovations that we’ve talked about, they’re all driven to help improve our customers’ experience – both on the borrower side as well as the lender side – by giving them services that are more on point, hassle-free, and faster,” says Widjaja. As such, the firm is working on new features on the funding side and is also looking for solutions to respond to the needs of its stakeholders and borrowers. “You will see more business solutions coming from Investree because at the end of the day, we’re here to help the SMEs grow,” Widjaja concludes.

Alibaba Cloud is the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group. It provides a comprehensive suite of global computing services to startups, corporations, and government organizations worldwide, as well as to merchants doing business on Alibaba Group’s marketplaces.

Find out more about Alibaba Cloud’s range of cloud services here.

This content was produced by Tech in Asia Studios, which connects brands with Asia’s tech community. Learn more about partnering with Tech in Asia Studios.