DiBanka democratizes access to financial services with Azure support

DiBanka is a technology company that develops IT solutions for financial well-being, connecting non-financial, public and private organizations, invoice operators and collaborators and/or pensioners through a digital ecosystem. 

In Colombia, in order for an employee or pensioner to have access to an invoicing credit, it was necessary for the latter to personally address the financial entity. In turn, this entity had to go to the paying company to verify the ability to pay according to the member's payroll, with the clerk being responsible for validating all this information. 

At the beginning of the health emergency, pensioners were unable to apply for credit without being exposed to biological risk. Given this context, and added to the fact that DiBanka showed that a large part of the citizens of remote municipalities had to access non-banking options because they could not physically go to the entity, the Colombian company began to think about a way to respond to these needs and optimize the credit process through technology. 

Technology as a financial services enabler

The invoicing credit in Colombia involves three actors: the affiliate, the payment agency and the invoicing operators. The DiBanka solution serves as an intermediary to this process, providing direct benefits to all parties involved. "A process that used to take between 8 and 15 days, today can be done in the same day, or in a maximum of 72 hours," says Ángela Ruíz, Commercial Vice President of DiBanka. 

As a single solution for the entire process, DiBanka dramatically streamlines and automates the invoice. Not only does it give the member the ability to apply for credit virtually but also, from the DiBanka portal, they can view the different invoicing operators and choose the one that best suits their needs. 

In addition, the payment department that previously had to verify whether the employee really had the possibility of accessing the credit requested now no longer has an operational role to move and can move to a strategic one: with DiBanka, the processing of each request is generated automatically. Thus, the paying company can be entirely dedicated to monitoring the private relationship that occurs between its affiliates and the employees of the invoicing. 

Finally, invoicing operators also receive multiple benefits. Using the tool, they achieve integration with all the payment offices where they work, thus being able to redirect their entire business force to other strategies. "DiBanka offers operators a credit application where they have not had to make any business effort. This reduces business costs and risk analysis costs on the operation. Now the application is already profiled with an affiliate and identified through a biometric registration process," adds Mauricio Chacón, CEO of DiBanka. He notes that "thanks to the reduction of these operating costs, members can access credits with lower interest rates today." 

Azure: the cloud behind DiBanka

DiBanka, working together with Microsoft partner Evolution XP, has developed its solution that provides triangulation among the three players in the invoicing process. "At first, the prototype began to be thought of as a solution that could be deployed in a public cloud provider," says Andrés Giraldo, CEO of Evolution XP. A public cloud, such as Microsoft Azure, provides lower costs, as you don't need to purchase hardware or software. It provides nearly unlimited scalability and high reliability and it doesn't need maintenance because the service provider takes care of it. 

In its prototype, DiBanka already had Azure Cognitive Services, Microsoft's cloud-based service that helps integrate cognitive intelligence into applications. Using Azure Face—a facial recognition software that works with artificial intelligence algorithms—and Custom Vision—the service that allows one to create, implement and improve one's own image classifiers to apply labels to images—DiBanka performs proof-of-life detection and facial recognition of its members based on their visual characteristics. Additionally, they also used Azure Machine Learning for this process, as it enables training, deployment, automation, management and tracking of the solution's machine learning models. 

"When the project began to grow, we needed to improve availability and security, so we decided to move to Azure using virtual machines," Giraldo says. An Azure virtual machine offers the flexibility of virtualization without the need to acquire and maintain the physical hardware that runs it while offering the benefits of a cloud platform. 

A second version of DiBanka is currently being built and will be container-based. Azure Container Registry, Azure Kubernetes Services, and Power BI services will be used for data analysis. 

"DiBanka is no longer an invoicing automation platform: it is now perceived as a financial wellness ecosystem," concludes Mauricio Chacón, CEO of DiBanka.