Finance House offers much needed support to small & medium sized businesses with cloud-based app

When individuals or mid-sized corporates want to take a loan in the UAE, Finance House is one of the credible companies that come to mind. As its customer base grew to 100,000 accounts, Finance House wanted to launch a fully digital financial institution, offering all of its services online. Its existing processes were time-consuming and paperintensive. For example, to perform funds transfer, clients had to send requests via fax, and Finance House would prepare a check and give it to them. Clients had to send out an email to know their balance information. The company knew it had to adapt.

“We operate in one of the most regulated markets in the world, and we sought more automation to implement ISO 27001 & SWIFT controls,” said TK Raman, CEO of Finance House. With these objectives in mind, the leadership team felt that it was the right time for the company to embrace the cloud.

The key considerations for moving into a cloud-based environment were scalability, flexibility, and reliability. Microsoft Azure, with its proven global infrastructure, perfectly aligned with the requirements of the company. “The built-in multi-layered security in all the services of Azure gave us the confidence to build applications for our customers on Azure,” said Raman.

Innovating and powering through the pandemic

Working with LogicEra, a technology partner specialized in Microsoft solutions development, Finance House set out to develop its first corporate banking app using Power Apps. Just as it was about to start development, the global pandemic hit. The company did not let this dampen its ambitions, though. It adapted to the circumstances and put together a team from different parts of the world to get the app across the finish line. “The pandemic taught us that we can develop apps and manage the development environment remotely,” says Raman. Using Microsoft Teams, the company was able to remove barriers to collaboration and communication. “It proved that we don’t need all the people in one room to do it,” observes Raman. “It was a very good learning experience. It has opened our vision to a perspective that it can be done, even if you don't have all the resources in-house.”

Accelerated development and deployment with Azure

Finance House is able to quickly build, deploy, and scale its web applications, mobile, and API integrations with Microsoft’s Azure Platform. “We wanted to focus on delivering new products and features quickly instead of spending time on IT management,” says Raman. The modern application development architecture allows the company to do just that, focusing on innovation instead of management. “We automated the entire development and release cycle using Azure,” said Waheed Mozaffar, Deputy CIO, Finance House. As of today, the company has launched the corporate banking app as a minimum viable product. The plan is to stabilize the app, add more functionalities in phase two, and incorporate customer feedback in phase three. 

For Finance House, collaborating with expert technology partners has been central to making the journey smoother. “We appreciate the experiences shared by Microsoft and LogicEra from other implementations of a similar nature. It was a very important aspect of the collaboration,” Raman concludes. 

Quick loan and money transfer process online

For corporate clients, the new app offers ease and flexibility when transferring funds or making payments. Clients can instantly check their balance through the app. Customers are also enjoying automated issuance of Letters of Guarantee through the app. Finance House keeps track of client feedback to improve and add new features to the corporate banking app. Going forward, Finance House plans to continue to innovate and digitize using Azure. It has already started developing a consumer banking app on Azure. “The development journey has become easier due to the automation offered by Microsoft,” confesses Mozaffar.