Godrej

Godrej Housing Finance Achieves Faster Time to Market and Fuels Innovation on AWS

2022

The home loan market in India grew by 32 percent from 2017 to 2021. Since inception, banking institutions have been the primary source of home financing. However, changing consumer demands have paved the way for other types of lenders. These include non-bank financial companies (NBFCs) and housing finance companies (HFCs), which help buyers fulfill their homeownership goals.
 
The Godrej Group saw an opportunity in the financial space in India and launched Godrej Housing Finance in 2020. The business builds on the reputation of its parent company, the Godrej Group, which has been associated with quality consumer products and services since 1897. Godrej Housing Finance offers technology-driven home loan products with a mission to provide fair, fast, and flexible financing.
 
Since the onset of the business, Godrej Housing Finance has partnered with leading developers across its operational landscape in India, customizing solutions for the developer ecosystem.

Launching a New Business in 9 Months

Godrej Housing Finance is a digital-first company that promotes efficient customer-facing operations. It chose to launch its digital business on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. “AWS empowered us to go to market fast, both with our core business and new ideas, and we don’t have to worry about scalability,” shares Pankaj Gupta, chief business officer at Godrej Housing Finance.
 
The business launched within nine months of commencing discussions with AWS and AWS Partner Flentas Technologies. The first three months were spent planning Godrej Housing Finance’s cloud architecture and performing user acceptance testing. Testing in the production environment was completed over the next four months, and the remaining two months were mostly spent on administrative procedures and regulatory approvals.
 
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AWS empowered us to go to market fast, both with our core business and new ideas, and we don’t have to worry about scalability.”

Pankaj Gupta
Chief Business Officer, Godrej Housing Finance

Offloading Maintenance with Managed Services

In addition to building resilient core infrastructure, Godrej Housing Finance leveraged a range of managed services from AWS to drive its business goals. “AWS has a variety of readily available services that make it easier to innovate by offloading the operational burden, especially compared to building from scratch in a traditional on-premises setup,” shares Jyothirlatha B, chief technology officer at Godrej Housing Finance.
 
A service that has proven particularly valuable is Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), with Multi-Availability Zone (Multi-AZ) deployments to enhance reliability with point-in-time recovery. Godrej Housing Finance uses PostgreSQL as its default database engine and offloads time-consuming database maintenance tasks with Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. It also maintains high availability for its backend systems such as SAP S/4HANA on AWS and its customer portal, where customers can check loan applications and disbursement statuses or interact with representatives via a real-time chatbot.

Adopting a SecOps Approach with Intelligent Threat Detection

During the three-month planning phase, Godrej Housing Finance worked closely with AWS and a few business partners to help guide infrastructure setup according to security best practices in the retail financial services sector. AWS organized several “marathon workshops” to discuss how to lay the foundation for a technology-driven finance business in India. “AWS and its partners were integral in our technology stack discussions, recommending solutions and approaches that fit our business while advising on security requirements,” relates Jyothirlatha.

Godrej Housing Finance has adopted a SecOps approach from the ground up to keep data privacy and security at the forefront of operations. It uses Amazon GuardDuty for intelligent threat protection, AWS Trusted Advisor for automated security checks, and AWS CloudTrail to monitor user activity in its backend.
 
“As a technology-oriented business, we’re aware of ever-present security threats. Our infrastructure setup with built-in guardrails on the AWS Cloud helps ensure that the required governance mechanisms are in place. At the same time, this setup gives our teams the autonomy to innovate,” adds Jyothirlatha.

Data Vault Offers Cost-Effective Aadhaar Compliance

The business also uses AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) and Amazon API Gateway with AWS Lambda serverless code to ensure compliance with data privacy rules. This combination of services helps Godrej Housing Finance to protect sensitive data such as customers’ Aadhaar details. Each customer’s Aadhaar number is securely encrypted in a data vault created on AWS.
 
If the business had opted for a third-party commercial solution to meet regulatory architecture requirements such as the creation of an Aadhaar vault, the estimated cost of the technology stack would have been 6–7 times higher than what Godrej Housing Finance spends today with AWS native security services.

Integrating Seamlessly with Fintechs

Another benefit of being a cloud-native company is the ease of integration with fintechs and other external partners. During the 2021 lockdowns, for example, the business collaborated with a fintech partner to introduce a video-based know-your-customer (KYC) tool for holding secure financial meetings. Typically, at least one in-person meeting is required as part of Godrej Housing Finance’s loan approval and disbursement process. With the new tool, customers can now complete their loan applications and any subsequent lending requests in a fully digital manner.
 
The business has also found the AWS Marketplace useful for connecting with new partners. “There are so many plug-and-play solutions available on the AWS Cloud. By sourcing solutions through AWS Marketplace, we can easily integrate vendors’ APIs and respond to business demands in an agile manner,” Jyothirlatha explains.

Improving Continually in a Growing Market

Godrej Housing Finance continues to focus on growing its business and enriching its SecOps pipeline on AWS. Its business model emphasizes continuous improvement to deliver the best possible experience for its customers.

Gupta concludes, “We’re constantly evaluating all our processes, even the ones that are working well, so we can continually enhance our customer experience and grow the business. With dedicated support from AWS and its partners, we can move quickly and stay ahead in this market.” 

Learn More

To learn more, visit thinkwithwp.com/financial-services.

About Godrej Housing Finance

Godrej Housing Finance (GHF), part of Godrej Industries Ltd., aims to build a long-term, sustainable, retail financial services business anchored in the Godrej Group's 125-year legacy of trust and excellence. GHF offers property-related loans and focuses on product innovation, with a digital-first approach, data-driven decision-making, and strong risk fundamentals.

Benefits

  • Launches new business in 9 months
  • Offloads database and infrastructure maintenance
  • Maintains high availability on customer-facing sites
  • Lowers compliance costs for encrypting personal data by 6–7 times
  • Responds to business demands in an agile manner
  • Integrates seamlessly with fintechs and vendor partners

AWS Services Used

AWS Key Management Service

AWS Key Management Service (KMS) makes it easy for you to create and manage cryptographic keys and control their use across a wide range of AWS services and in your applications.

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Amazon GuardDuty

Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that continuously monitors your AWS accounts and workloads for malicious activity and delivers detailed security findings for visibility and remediation.

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Amazon Relational Database Service

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud.

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AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda is a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets you run code for virtually any type of application or backend service without provisioning or managing servers.

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