Fewchore Finance Company Limited

Financial Services — Digital Banking and Lending

1. Scaling the Digital Platform:

Fewchore Finance relied on the Fewchore App to handle key services like funds transfers, bill payments, and loan management. However, their existing cloud infrastructure couldn’t keep up with their growing customer base. The app needed a more scalable and reliable platform to support their expansion plans. Minimal downtime and enhanced performance were non-negotiable for Fewchore’s operations, thereby making a move to AWS the perfect solution.

2. Modernizing the Loan Processing Engine:

As Fewchore’s loan portfolio grew beyond ₦40 billion, their lending operations needed a purpose-built platform capable of fast loan processing, comprehensive portfolio analytics, and regulatory compliance reporting. The existing setup lacked the database performance, automated scaling, and enterprise security features required for a financial institution targeting significant growth.

3. Meeting Financial Regulatory Requirements:

With an expanding portfolio, Fewchore needed infrastructure that met financial regulatory standards: encryption of all data at rest and in transit, secure credential management, comprehensive audit trails, and disaster recovery capabilities with defined recovery objectives.

Phase 1: Application Migration to AWS

SoftGEM designed and implemented the initial AWS migration for Fewchore, ensuring their digital infrastructure could handle current demands while preparing them for future growth.

• Compute Power: We deployed two Amazon EC2 instances across different Availability Zones (AZs). This ensured that even if one server went down, the other would take over seamlessly, maintaining high availability.


• Scalable Storage: AWS Elastic File System (EFS) was implemented for file storage. It integrates easily with EC2 and grows with Fewchore’s needs, offering both reliability and flexibility.


• Database Support: MongoDB was configured on AWS, adhering to Fewchore’s existing operational requirements and ensuring smooth integration with their legacy application workflows during the initial migration phase.

Phase 2: Finlake CIB Deployment & Database Modernization

Building on the Phase 1 foundation, SoftGEM deployed Finlake CIB (Corporate & Institutional Banking) into Fewchore’s AWS environment. Finlake CIB is a comprehensive banking tooling product that introduced a modern, managed database layer purpose-built for financial services operations, working alongside the existing infrastructure to power Fewchore’s loan processing and analytics platform.

Key components of this phase include:

• Amazon RDS Aurora (PostgreSQL-compatible), Multi-AZ: High-performance database operations for loan processing, customer management, and financial analytics. Aurora’s architecture delivers up to 3x the throughput of standard PostgreSQL, enabling Fewchore to process loans in under 2 minutes. Multi-AZ deployment provides automated failover for continuous availability.


• AWS Fargate Containers: Finlake CIB application services running on serverless Fargate containers with connection pooling to RDS Aurora, auto-scaling based on demand, and no server management overhead.


• Security & Encryption: Customer-managed AWS KMS keys for encryption at rest across RDS, S3, and EBS volumes. TLS 1.2+ enforced for all data in transit. AWS Secrets Manager for automated credential rotation with zero-downtime updates, eliminating hardcoded credentials.


• VPC Architecture: Multi-tier VPC with private database subnets, security groups restricting RDS access to the application tier only, and no public database accessibility. VPC endpoints for secure AWS service communication without traversing the public internet.


• Monitoring & Analytics: CloudWatch Enhanced Monitoring with custom dashboards for loan processing metrics, transaction success rates, and peak performance analysis. CloudWatch Alarms with defined thresholds for proactive issue detection, including CPU utilization, free storage space, and application error rates. AWS GuardDuty enabled for intelligent threat detection.


• Backup & Disaster Recovery: Automated backups with 7-day retention, cross-region replication for disaster recovery, S3 cross-region replication for static assets, and documented recovery procedures with a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 3 hours and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 1 hour.


• Identity & Access Management: AWS Identity Center for centralized user access, permission sets aligned with job roles, temporary credentials with hourly rotation, MFA enforcement for all users, and CloudTrail enabled across all regions for comprehensive audit logging and regulatory compliance.

• Seamless Migration: The Phase 1 migration to AWS was completed with minimal downtime of less than 2 hours, ensuring uninterrupted service for Fewchore’s customers.


• 3x Performance Improvement: The Finlake CIB deployment on RDS Aurora delivered a 3x improvement in database performance, reducing loan processing time to under 2 minutes and achieving 95% customer satisfaction post-deployment.


• 25–30% Infrastructure Cost Reduction: Fargate’s serverless architecture and Aurora’s efficient resource utilization reduced operational costs by 25–30% compared to the previous setup.


• Scalable Growth Platform: The infrastructure now supports Fewchore’s growth trajectory from their current customer base of 7,000+ toward their target of 50,000+ customers, with auto-scaling ensuring the platform grows with demand.


• Enterprise-Grade Security & Compliance: Full encryption at rest and in transit, automated credential rotation via Secrets Manager, and comprehensive audit trails via CloudTrail meeting Nigerian financial regulatory compliance requirements.


• High Availability: Multi-AZ RDS Aurora with automated failover ensures 99.9%+ database availability, supporting Fewchore’s commitment to reliable financial services for their growing customer base.


• Future-Proofed Scalability: With AWS’s auto-scaling infrastructure and Aurora’s ability to handle high-throughput workloads, Fewchore can confidently pursue their growth targets without infrastructure limitations.