(Additional reporting by Nathaniel Fetalvero)

Indonesia’s peer-to-peer (P2P) lending sector is flourishing. According to research by the Asian Development Bank Institute, the vertical represents 43% of the country’s fintech industry. The growth of P2P lending has led many investors – both from within Indonesia and across Asia – to back various digital lending platforms that have sprung up in recent years.

But these online services often face challenges in ensuring that their borrowers have the ability to make good on their loans.

Quicker assessment

Most P2P lending platforms have risk control measures in place to assess their customers’ credit worthiness. However, these checks need to be performed quickly or companies risk losing business.

“We must be able to process [users’ credit scores] very quickly because people expect you to be able to give them loans quickly,” says Felix Suroso, IT and quality assurance manager at P2P lending service DanaRupiah. “If you don’t assess [users’] risks quickly, they’ll go to competitors.”

To move fast, platforms like DanaRupiah leverage Alibaba Cloud’s machine learning technology. The cloud technology service provider’s servers allow companies to sort and analyze large chunks of data much faster than if they were to perform the tasks manually.

“One person will only be able to analyze one [piece of] data in maybe five minutes,” Suroso adds. In comparison, machine learning allows DanaRupiah to analyze 1,000 pieces of data each minute. “That is definitely a huge advantage for us,” he says.

Utilizing Alibaba Cloud’s cloud servers also ensures that DanaRupiah’s services are up and running around the clock. This means that even if a transaction were to be made in the middle of the night, it would still go through seamlessly.

Processing large amounts of data

DanaRupiah is working on expanding its reach to be able to serve more borrowers, from fishermen and farmers to small businesses such as food stalls. However, serving customers from different sectors means the company will have to abide by different regulations for each of the markets it operates in.

This is where Alibaba Cloud’s service plays a crucial role in enabling the business, says Suroso. The cloud provider’s data processing server boosts DanaRupiah’s computing capabilities, meaning it can efficiently assess large amounts of data with various factors such as markets and industries borrowers in play.

“All this data is very hard to analyze. So we need a really quick cloud computing service to be able to analyze this data to ensure that there’s no human error as well to analyze the credit scoring of our customers in all these different sectors,” Suroso shares.

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.

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