BharatPe: Leveraging Google Cloud for Enhanced Data Analytics and AI to Promote Digital Payments

BharatPe is a fintech company founded in 2018 with the vision to make financial inclusion a reality for Indian merchants. The company makes digital payments more accessible for over 10 million small offline merchants and kirana store owners in India, with its interoperable UPI QR which was the first in India with zero transaction fees. The company also facilitates loans to offline merchants in partnership with NBFCs, and launched India’s first zero rental POS machine for merchants in 2020. BharatPe also offers consumer fintech products like postpe. Named as the 'Fintech Company of the Year' at India Banking Summit & Awards 2022, BharatPe serves a network of 10 million merchants across 300+ cities in India.

BharatPe, a fintech company founded in 2018, aimed to make digital payments more accessible for over 10 million small offline merchants and kirana store owners in India. However, the company faced challenges in managing the massive amounts of data generated daily from payment processing to business analysis. Prior to using Google Cloud, BharatPe managed its legacy data warehouse with limited capacity to run a large number of queries. The company ran key performance indicator (KPI) reports, without the ability to understand real-time data patterns. Loading three months of data for quarterly reports took more than 30 minutes on the legacy system, and in some cases, queries failed because the system could not scale to support analytical needs. Additionally, BharatPe operates in a multi-cloud environment for disaster recovery and needed a data platform that could run queries against data, regardless of where it resides.

BharatPe turned to Google Cloud to overcome these challenges. The company used BigQuery to process up to 80TB of data each day with minimal infrastructure management. BigQuery's capabilities allowed BharatPe to query several terabytes of data within minutes, with its capacity to concurrently run 100 queries by default, along with cache capabilities. The company also used Cloud Composer to orchestrate more than 1,000 data workflows between clouds, supporting its multi-cloud strategy. Document AI and Vision AI were used to extract data and insights from onboarding documents to automate its Know-Your-Customer (KYC) process. Additionally, BharatPe used machine learning to speed up loan approval decisions with minimal manual intervention from loan officers. The company also used BigQuery to analyze transaction data and create a loan profile on each applicant that determines the loan amount.

• The use of Google Cloud has significantly improved BharatPe's operational efficiency. The company is now able to process data at speed and scale for real-time decision making. The serverless architecture allows BharatPe to manage pipelines with a lean team. The company is also able to scale its data processing, especially for data-intensive workflows such as machine learning. The use of machine learning has also improved credit access for small merchants by speeding up loan approval decisions. BharatPe is now able to create a loan profile on each applicant that determines the loan amount, with some merchants getting their loans approved almost immediately. The company also uses machine learning for KYC and underwriting for its consumer-facing postpe app, helping customers get instant credit for buy-now-pay-later purchases, without the hassle of applying for a credit card.

• Processes up to 80TB of data each day on BigQuery with minimal infrastructure management

• Supports a multi-cloud strategy with Cloud Composer to orchestrate more than 1,000 data workflows between clouds

• Reduced time to insight and enabled automated decisioning using AI/ML for critical business processes like fraud detection and credit decisions