CheQ: Easing the credit payment process while supporting business growth

The consumer credit market in India is growing quickly, as individuals add new credit products and the number of consumers accessing credit for the first time increases. However, as the pace of life accelerates, managing credit products can prove complex and time-consuming. A single missed payment can compromise a consumers' credit record and sour relationships with credit providers.

Bangalore-headquartered startup CheQ aims to resolve this with a mobile app and platform that helps consumers in India understand, manage and leverage credit products, such as cards and buy now pay later (BNPL) financing, more effectively.

"CheQ's vision on extending a high value credit management platform for its users is based on three key strategic principles, namely better insights from data, high degree of reliability, and developing trust on data privacy. We decided to go cloud native with Google Cloud as its strong offerings on data analytics, security and scalability helped us meet our goals faster by reducing the complexities of such a large scale orchestration," says Bipin Toro, Vice President of Engineering at CheQ.

With CheQ, customers can see each credit product they are using and its impact on their credit health. They can also manage their credit portfolio including aggregating different credit products such as cards and loans into a single dashboard for easier navigation and a single bill for payment, and use credit products to meet their financial needs.

This product has been resonating with consumers. From its launch in early 2023, CheQ has grown to about one million users in six months. The CheQ app can be downloaded to mobile devices running either iOS or Android operating systems. Once a customer downloads the app to their device, CheQ analyzes the user's bureau records and bank messages to identify the consumer's credit products, creates consolidated monthly bills based on the individual credit bills received and provides a secure, easy-to-navigate facility for consumers to make payments.

Scalability, resilience, and cost-efficiency

CheQ quickly outgrew the comparatively inflexible third-party provider it used at inception, and scaled the efficacy of the solution from 28.6 percent to 80.2 percent with continuous feedback loops via Google Cloud. Its founders established three criteria for a replacement. The first, is to give developers, engineers and other team members the flexibility to experiment with product and feature development, the second, to enable high-velocity product delivery to continuously improve the platform's ability to identify products and bills for customers, and thirdly, to provide high grade security to protect customer and business data. Upon evaluating the products, services and costs of three multinational cloud providers, the business determined Google Cloud was the best fit for its needs.

"Google Cloud stood out for a number of reasons, including its AI and machine learning services, and its presence in India that enabled us to implement disaster recovery while meeting regulatory demands to keep customer data within the country," says Vaibhav Magon, Senior Director of Engineering , CheQ.

The business deployed its platform and app to Google Cloud services in Mumbai and engaged closely with technical and account support. "We reached out to the Google Cloud team several times a week during this process and received high quality help in using cloud services to build out our offerings," explains Magon. With the assistance of the Google Cloud team, CheQ created a test-ready version of its platform and app in just six weeks, and launched a production version in just three months.

CheQ now runs on a microservices architecture powered by Docker and Google Kubernetes Engine for scalability, ease of management, rapid deployment and speed to market. The business uses GitHub Actions to automate deployment and applies a blue/green approach to minimize risk, execute rollbacks as needed and eliminate downtime.

Minimizing risk with robust cloud security

As a fintech company that handles sensitive customer data, CheQ is aware of the importance of security, and applies zero trust policies to minimize risk. The business operates in a Virtual Private Cloud that adheres to Open Source Foundation for Application Security and leading network security standards. "We've also worked closely with Google Cloud to incorporate the best security strategies, policies and products into our environment, including authentication and encryption of data at rest and in transit," explains Magon.

Collaboration and coordination enhances business outcomes

Google Workspace also plays a key role in enhancing collaboration and productivity across the business. In particular, CheQ relies on Calendar from Google Workspace to coordinate release schedules across teams. "With high-velocity software and feature deployments, we need to efficiently map what we do as product and technology teams against our business outcomes," says Magon. "With Calendar, we can keep everyone on track." If development or other team members miss online meetings on Meet, they can access recordings to keep up with the discussions.

While Google Cloud helped secure the processing systems of CheQ, enterprise level data protection and access control requirements were addressed using Cloud Data Loss Prevention (DLP). A centralized identity management using Google Workspace's SSO along with DLP on email and Drive helped protect all data repositories and also meet compliance requirements.

Improving efficiency and removing data silos across the business

The business uses Document AI and Google Cloud to identify and extract relevant credit product information from customer email and SMS accounts. And with APIs, it has also built an overall credit management and payment solution for each customer. "As a startup with no data science team and with only a small operations team, an AI-enabled tool that helped us identify and extract relevant information from multiple credit products via a full-fledged OCR solutioning was a key enabler for us," says Magon. "With Document AI, we now only rely on a few developers and one customer support team member to run our processes."

With its platform and app running smoothly in Google Cloud, the lean CheQ team can focus on innovation and growth priorities. The business now plans to use Google Cloud services such as a BigQuery data warehouse to create what Magon describes as "clear handshakes" in making data available to approved users across the organization. CheQ has already obtained detailed advice from the Google Cloud team about how to build robust pipelines for batch and streaming data, and creating a data warehouse and data lake to inform and drive its offerings.

"With Google Cloud, we have the confidence to commit to audacious business goals without worrying about performance, availability, scalability, and with the boost of access to leading AI and machine learning technologies," concludes Magon.