epiFi Uses StarTree To Help Millions of Consumers to “Know Your Money”
epiFi, a FinTech company, relies on StarTree Cloud to power top features of their money management application, Fi Money. With StarTree, epiFi is able to run queries in seconds while achieving lower latencies and higher throughput.
- Query times
- Seconds
- Consumers of Fi Money
- 3.5M
- Transactions streamed to StarTree
- Billions
Summary
- epiFi’s Fi Money mobile money management app empowers 3.5 million consumers
- Streams billions of transactions to StarTree via AWS Kinesis and Kafka Streams
- StarTree allows epiFi to achieve lower latencies and higher throughput on the same infrastructure
Fi Money (Fi.money) is the mobile application from epiFi empowering millions of consumers across India to manage their finances in real-time. Their founding team combines decades of tech and financial sector wisdom gained from Google, Netflix, PayPal, and elsewhere, and seeks to combine the lessons learned into a new mobile platform for consumers based on two central pillars of services: “Know Your Money” and “Grow Your Money.”
In the first, epiFi helps working professionals connect all their disparate accounts together to get a complete view of their finances, both their income and expenses. This provides insights into their earning and spending, demystifying their finances and making clear the progress they are making towards their goals.
For the latter, epiFi works with regulated partners in banking, wealth, credit and lending who can offer services through which Fi Money users can save and invest. For example, while epiFi is not a regulated bank themselves, they can help users open a savings account via their partners at Federal Bank. They also serve as a low-risk way for beginners to understand how to invest in mutual funds and stocks, starting for as little as ₹1,000 (1,000 Indian Rupees = ~$12 US Dollars), pledging zero brokerage, wire-transfer, or withdrawal fees.
Growing finances with StarTree Cloud
epiFi had grown to a certain scale using traditional transactional databases and data warehouse technologies. However, such systems were never designed for low-latency, high-throughput analytical use cases. It was at that point epiFi turned to StarTree Cloud, powered by Apache Pinot.
The epiFi team heard about how Apache Pinot was already in use in production at LinkedIn and Uber, evaluated it for their own use cases and came away impressed by what they learned. However, they wanted to consume it as a fully-managed service to avoid burdening their engineering team with administrative and operational responsibilities.
StarTree Cloud allows Fi Money to return results in seconds or even sub-second times — required for mobile application responsiveness. They can drive the higher throughputs at far lower latencies without increasing their infrastructure spend.
Within the Fi Money application, StarTree Cloud powers a number of features, including the spend analyzer, where users can see their complete transaction history by expense category, merchant, time and various other dimensions.StarTree is also behind Fi Money’s rewards program — to see what rewards resonate most with Fi Money’s three and a half million users. In all, StarTree aggregates metrics for billions of transaction records. And the more epiFi uses it, the more they are seeing their organization shift in thinking, creatively finding new use cases built on top of real-time analytics.
“We’ve been interacting with StarTree — the community and the team behind it — for more than a couple of years now, and throughout all the interactions that we have had so far we have found them to be very, very startup friendly and open to feedback from the customers.”
StarTree Cloud is now an integral part of the real-time data architecture at epiFi, fed from upstream data sources via Kafka Streams and AWS Kinesis. As a cloud-native service, StarTree Cloud allows epiFi to scale their business smoothly and comfortably, even while operating at peak throughputs. As a fully-managed service, all operations and administration are managed by StarTree, allowing epiFi engineers to focus on innovating and delivering new features for the Fi Money application. Best of all, StarTree Cloud offers a “Bring Your Own Cloud” (BYOC) deployment option, so all customer financial data remains within epiFi’s security boundaries and governance.
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