Moula Money banks on Rackspace

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news US-based cloud computing firm Rackspace has released a case study spelling out how its services have helped online lending startup Moula Money scale its systems to keep pace with its rapid growth.

Moula Money uses innovative technology to make quick decisions on short-term loans to small businesses in Australia.

Founded in Melbourne in 2014, the startup has developed a platform that “substantially shortens” the lending process by using the applicant’s e-commerce footprint to determine whether or not to approve it for a loan.

Moula Money said it can analyze real-time sales data and performance history by processing an applicant’s data from sources such as eBay and a number of Australian banks.

The firm said its advantage is its ability to tap many data sources, including sales, banking and accounting data to rapidly determine a prospective borrower’s base eligibility for a loan and the terms of that loan.

“Whereas banks require borrowers to go through a conventional loan application process, moving at a much more time-consuming pace, Moula enables a small business to make a quick and easy loan application — and the decision is made almost immediately,” said Piers Moller, CTO.

Moula has tapped into a market that, until now, had not been well served. The firm’s online loans of up to A$100,000 have created a small-business lending niche with few regional competitors. As a result, Moula said it has seen consistent, and growing, demand from small businesses over recent months.

However, Moula has moved quickly from being a newcomer going through its “apprenticeship” into a locally prominent position in an important growth area of finance.

“We are an online lender to small businesses, including sole traders, partnerships and trusts” said Moller. “In a very short space of time, we’ve moved from something very small to a known player in our space.”

Ensuring speed and reliability while still managing the growth of its technology-driven lending platform proved to be a challenge that Moula needed to solve. It did that by bringing Rackspace into the equation; relying on the firm’s managed hosting, dedicated servers, cloud servers and load balancers.

The multi-platform Moula service is integrated with various APIs and is based on a .NET stack.

“It’s well-known technology, and we’re making that process as efficient and seamless as possible,” Moller said.

“Scaling our architecture isn’t just a case of adding resources – we need to add capacity and new functionality while keeping existing systems up and running. Rackspace’s expertise is essential in managing this process,” Moller said.

Image credit: Rackspace

1 COMMENT

  1. Link to the case study:
    https://stories.rackspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/CRP-Moula-Money-Case-Study-Final.pdf

    Sound IT execution strategy. Third party supported IT infrastructure utilising applicatioms written in Windows/.NET/RDBMS (typically SQL Server) or (my preference) Linux/ Java EE/RDBMS.

    24×7 high availability data centre with backup power & data connections expensive to provide (these are not your NBN connections). Leveraging their experience (costly) for appropriate availability monitoring and transaction scaling cheaper than obtaining inhouse expertise. Be aware were your data (and any backups) is to be located, can have legal complications.

    A strategy I’ve been using & advocating for years.

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