Scalability at NAVI: How Navi’s Infrastructure Ensures Business Continuity

“Since day one we knew the viability of our product and were confident of its acceptance and reach. Our goal as a team was to build our systems on an #infrastructure that was scalable to handle even 100 million users without compromising the end-to-end user experience. Here are some insights into our journey and the tech stack we experimented with to ensure that the application is future-ready to support this vision.” — Amit Jambotkar

Navi, the path-breaking digital loan lending application, is designed to change the way the majority of India’s smartphone-savvy population deal with their finances. The completely digital and paperless process takes only minutes, and the funds are disbursed almost instantaneously.

From its inception, our goal at Navi is to build a domain-driven design and event-driven architecture with a vision to handle even 100 million customers. To achieve this, we continuously work on improving the architecture style to support Navis’s aspiration and make the platform adaptable.

We would love for our readers and customers to gain deeper insights into the innovation and problem-solving at Navi, with inputs straight from the team of engineers in the Navi team who designed the application and are constantly working to ensure it is future-ready.

Insight into Innovation and Problem-Solving at Navi

Like many other start-ups, Navi too had its share of initial hiccups and challenges like database performance and system performance issues. And like all successful start-ups, our teams banded together to resolve these issues and address the technical debt with a technology-driven and agile approach to achieve optimal customer experience.

The database that used to run at 90% in the initial days now uses only 15% of the CPU, resulting in speed, enhanced user interaction, and fewer errors allowing developers to spend their time on innovation rather than fixing errors. This also has had a company-wide impact with reduced costs, which allows us to offer our customers competitive interest rates.

Event-Driven Microservice Architecture

Navi’s systems are built with an event-driven architecture to achieve high throughput, reduced latency, and scalability, and an LMS that can adapt to changes and make decisions in real-time.

The entire loan cycle is updated in real-time with the customer intimated of the same. For e.g., automated notifications for loan approvals, EMI reminders, interest accrual, late fees, closures, etc.

To ensure a continuously improving end-to-end customer experience we are slowly transitioning from Java to Go and Kotlin on a use-case basis. Our tech stack also includes Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, Apache Hudi, and Apache Spark Ecosystem.

What’s Next at Navi?

The plan is to build an infrastructural platform to accommodate other verticals like insurance, core banking, etc. We see Navi becoming a SaaS provider to even non-banking businesses that can use the platform and deploy it to suit their specific requirements, with the core functionalities remaining the same.

Our short-term goals are to enhance the end-to-end journey for Navi users. To end the current wait time of up to 8 hours after a mandate is raised, we look to partner with different banks. Our customers can set up a direct debit with their banks for repaying Navi loans and get notified immediately in real-time. We believe this will also improve the customer support experience and optimise the entire loan life cycle.

The Culture at Navi

Ours is an open-door policy. We value innovation and support our engineers to do the same by giving them an environment where they can thrive. We encourage them to experiment with different architectural patterns and terminologies and tackle problems with technology at the forefront.

Conclusion

Navi hopes to touch many lives across the length and breadth of the country. Our platform is built to make this a possibility without compromising the user experience, speed, and quality. We are backed by some of the most ingenious minds that work tirelessly to ensure we have the infrastructure to realise our vision of becoming India’s most trusted digital lending app.