For many individuals, the ability to achieve a greater sense of financial wellbeing seems to be tantalisingly within reach.

The ability to see and understand your credit rating is the first step to achieving financial transparency. This is where ClearScore, a Fintech business based in the UK, comes to its full potential. 

ClearScore advises, irrespective of circumstances, how to achieve greater financial wellbeing.  It does this through various platforms and mediums such as articles on its website. The offshoot is then that it also suggests third parties who can assist in offering services to those individuals wishing to improve their overall credit score.

It comes down to predicting your future behaviour based on how you managed your debt in the past. In South Africa, the company works in conjunction with Experian, one of the country’s largest credit bureaus.

Launched in 2015, the company has accumulated over 12 million users and is now expanding into Australia, India, South Africa, and the UK.

How do they manage such a high-volume user base? In April 2017 ClearScore migrated its infrastructure onto the AWS platform. “The primary goal for this was increasing productivity,” explains Klaus Thorup, chief technology officer at ClearScore. “Services such as Amazon EKS, Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, AWS Analytics, and AWS Serverless have not only improved productivity levels by at 600%, but we can now also  deliver more products at a significantly faster pace.”

Through AWS ClearScore can deploy its platform into a new market within three months, with data separation, getting 500 updates a month, with over 99.9% uptime and a 10:1 developer to operations ratio.

“Since engaging AWS, our DevOps releases have increased from one release per developer per month to one every three days,” Thorup explains. “This enables our software engineers to focus on inventing new features and quickly shipping these product features to our users, leaving the job of managing a secure reliable global infrastructure to AWS.”

ClearScore also has the ability through AWS to scale at the touch of a button. “This allows us to cater for twice the maximum number of active users than before we moved completely into the cloud,” Thorup points out. 

With AWS Africa situated in Cape Town, the company is able to serve South African customers using local infrastructure. This perfectly positions the company in the lead up to South Africa’s impending data privacy law – the Protection of Personal Information Act (PoPIA) – coming into operation in July 2021. Businesses in South Africa that do not comply with PoPIA after this date face severe penalties, ranging from fines to prison time, or both.

“ClearScore is already compliant with PoPIA,” states Thorup. 

Africa (Cape Town) is the 23rd AWS Region and the first one in Africa. It comprises three Availability Zones, bringing the Global AWS Infrastructure to a total of 73 Availability Zones.

“Customers here will have a better user experience of obtaining their credit report and score, for free, forever and super-fast, even if they have a mobile device and a slower connection speed,” Thorup concludes.