Neo4j Helps Latin American Financial Infrastructure Provider Give Millions of Merchants Better Access to Funding

This financial infrastructure provider is one of several official registrars in its market and serves as the Latin America region’s financial backbone. The company enables efficient transactions, secure financial markets, and improved lending access to millions of merchants and small retailers.

As an intermediary between merchants, banks, lending institutions, and the national central bank, the company fortifies the nation’s financial stability and bolsters its credibility in global markets, both attracting investments and contributing to the resilience of the interconnected global financial system.

Managing and integrating vast, complex financial data effectively and efficiently means everything to the organization and the central bank. The company wanted to be able to answer the central bank’s questions, provide complete transparency into its data models, and ensure compliance in a highly regulated market. The company needed to find the right partner to help develop an innovative data analytics platform that could process tens of millions of merchants’ credit and debit card transactions with ease.

After a vigorous vetting process, the company selected Neo4j’s graph database to power its data platform and build on its agile cloud infrastructure powered by AWS. This combination gave the organization the foundation for better data modeling, more precise reporting, and the ability to manage compliance and security with confidence — ultimately leading to new solutions and products that enable lenders to make faster, more informed, and fairer credit decisions, and ensure more profitable loan offers while minimizing risk.

Reducing Costs and Eliminating Time and Resource Constraints

Each registrar shares financial and transaction data with one another in a common repository. While all of the data is interconnected, the company knew that managing such a high volume of growing data and relationships with a traditional relational database would be nearly impossible.

For example, with a conventional database, the organization would need to join multiple tables, which would inevitably lead to performance issues as data volume increases. Additionally, conventional databases require the structure of the data to be defined in advance, leading to schema rigidity and future scalability concerns. All of this requires extensive time, effort, and computing power – which, in turn, can increase costs and pose budget pitfalls.

“We don’t need the same amount of time to translate and process data with Neo4j,” says the Chief Executive Officer. “The new architecture includes the right processing layers to accelerate the process – while reducing costs – to transform the data in real time.” Changes to new strategies or business rules can be applied to data in other domains, enabling the company to use its data platform in more innovative ways in the future.

Improved Access to Capital for Millions of Merchants

The company’s data platform will manage merchants’ credit and debit card transactions and allow them to use this data as a valuable new type of collateral when applying for loans. Banks will also be able to take advantage of higher volumes of more connected decisions to automate their lending systems and processes.

Neo4j’s high-performance storage and processing capabilities integrated seamlessly with AWS and enabled the organization to model the intricate relationships and dynamic networks for its interconnected financial data, including details on merchants and creditors.

“With Neo4j powering our data platform, we will be able to help create a more equitable lending environment that will provide access to capital for millions of small businesses,” says the CEO. “At the same time, we will be able to comply with the central bank’s stringent regulations and improve our ability to respond to their requests for information. This is no small feat, and one we couldn’t have accomplished without Neo4j.”

50% of Development Resources Freed for Higher-Value Work

From a technical perspective, Neo4j allows the company’s developers and IT staff to work much more efficiently. The solution and architecture make use of Neo4j AuraDB Enterprise, Neo4j’s graph database managed service on AWS. This uses Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) for reliability and scalability.

The new architecture enabled the organization to reduce the number of employees once assigned to the data analytics project by 50% – freeing valuable resources to work on more strategic projects.

“Neo4j gives us a much better way to meet our service level agreement with the central bank,” explains the CEO. “We now have a common platform where employees don’t have to wait for someone else to hand off critical information, which will help us respond much faster and with the full confidence that we’re giving them exactly the right information.”

The company considered both IaaS and SaaS options for deploying Neo4j on AWS. With the SaaS option, AuraDB Enterprise, the cost of infrastructure, license and administration are all included as part of the service. That is less expensive than paying for those items individually on IaaS.

Positioned to Serve a $7.1 Trillion Market

The organization is also working on other innovative data products related to lending, such as fraud detection and credit risk management, enhancing its data analysis and product development capabilities with generative AI. The company has integrated Neo4j’s knowledge graphs with foundation models from Amazon Bedrock, ensuring faster, accurate, and explainable GenAI enterprise results – all while remaining compliant with changing regulatory requirements.

More notably, the company will be able to expand its use of credit and debit card transaction data and acquire merchants’ invoicing and accounts receivables data as a new collateral source. Tapping into a $7.1 trillion market will lead to even better lending processes and decisions for all parties.

“With Neo4j as the backbone of our data analytics platform, our internal processes are faster, more efficient, and much more cost-effective,” says the CEO. “We will be able to manage data to improve our own business and better serve millions of merchants and financial institutions to improve the entire lending process.”

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