Indonesia’s digital bank pioneer creates more smiles with the help of MongoDB Atlas

INTRODUCTION

Changing lives through data-driven technology

To Bring 200 million smiles by 2025 – that’s the goal of Amar Bank.

Since 2014, the bank has been a pioneer in digital finance solutions that positively impacts people’s lives in Indonesia. It provides innovative and safe ways to plan and manage finances through leading-edge technology.

Amar Bank was the pioneer of digital banking in Indonesia to focus on providing microloans to people who wouldn’t be able to get financial services from traditional banks (unbanked and underserved). For many, typical hurdles to accessing smaller loans include not having a credit history or the collateral to secure a loan. In addition, conventional lenders have a daunting paper application process that takes much time and effort to complete.

Given the obstacles many potential borrowers face, Amar Bank created the AI-led, intelligent Tunaiku, digital lending platform, to enable more people to get the finance they need quickly and easily without the traditional lending requirements. Customers complete a simple application on the Tunaiku apps, get a quick assessment, and can be accepted for a loan within minutes.

By leveraging technology and data, Amar Bank has been able to break down the barriers so their customers can access small loans to make a big difference for themselves and their communities.

For example, a small business owner running a laundromat might have several washing machines out of service but lacks the funds to get them repaired. This means less income for his family and community. In this case, getting a small loan from a conventional bank would not be feasible, but Amar Bank through Tunaiku, is able to help.

Amar Bank began using Google Big Query for analytics, which was the starting point of moving everything to Google Cloud. After they migrated their final application to Google Cloud in 2020, they also decided to upgrade to MongoDB Atlas to assist with operational management and support more flexible scalability. Since MongoDB has a close partnership with Google, Atlas runs natively on Google.

One big plus of moving to MongoDB Atlas was the seamless migration from self-managed community to the fully managed Atlas service.

“The migration to MongoDB Atlas was very simple with absolutely no downtime. With some of the other database technologies, we had some issues getting it into the cloud,” Ahmad said.

Another benefit with MongoDB Atlas is auto-scaling which automatically increases capacity as the number of customers and usage increase and dials down when customer use decreases. This helps keep costs low in a business where profit margins from lending are tight.

THE RESULTS

Delivering hundreds of millions of dollars to Indonesian economy

Since its establishment in 2014, Amar Bank has gone from strength to strength. It has grown its employees from a total of 17 people in 2014 to more than 1,080 in 2022 and has brought home 28 prestigious awards since 2017. These included the TOP Digital Implementation Award and Asia Pacific Enterprise Awards (APEA) in 2021.

As a result of making credit accessible to more people, Amar Bank disbursed USD $537 million (IDR8 trillion) in small loans to more than 575,000 customers in 2022. This resulted in a huge increase in revenue in seven years – from USD $1.07 million annually to USD $48.5 million.

The next step for Amar Bank is extending its innovative technology to the MSME space. So businesses without financial statements and credit histories that conventional lenders require, can still get life changing loans. MongoDB will play a crucial role in managing new types of unstructured data to create and apply a business-focused credit decision model.

MongoDB also keeps the options open for going multi-cloud. “MongoDB is cloud-agnostic. The multi-cloud element gives us flexibility as we grow and adapt our cloud strategy. MongoDB opens the door for our multi-cloud future,” Kevin said.