At everyoneINVESTED, they are all about one thing: "Helping banks and financial organizations in transforming their customers from savers into loyal investors." And to achieve that, they focus primarily on online banking. But that obviously brings its own set of challenges, especially when it comes to IT. That's why we worked with Flowfactor to find them a more cost efficient solution for their Azure environment.
From a small innovation team within the KBC Groep to full-fledged FinTech, everyoneINVESTED is a young, dynamic organization in full growth. Their specialty? Making it easier, faster and safer for customers of financial institutions to invest. To do this, they mainly rely on behavioral finance techniques. But what does that mean exactly?
"We offer financial institutions an alternative way to encourage their savers to invest", says Geert Bernaerts, Finance Manager at everyoneINVESTED. "We help financial advisors to create an appropriate investor profile in a more playful way, allowing them to offer personalized investments to their clients.”
And that usually comes with quite a few challenges.
“In order to offer our services outside the KBC Groep, we needed to run on separate IT infrastructures. And for that, we really needed a partner", explains Jeroen Van Lysebettens, IT architect at everyoneINVESTED. "Geert and I initially contacted the Cronos Group. And they quickly pointed us to Arxus and Flowfactor."
Together with Flowfactor, one of our partners within The Cronos Group, we looked for a way to accommodate everyoneINVESTED's rapid growth. “We then set up a cloud-native infrastructure for them, using Azure DevOps, which ensured that everyoneINVESTED would be able to deploy their financial services flexibly to banks all over the world”, says Kilian Niemegeerts, co-founder of Flowfactor.
But managing and maintaining an Azure environment usually takes quite a bit of effort. After a little while, their Azure costs started rising significantly. And when they started monitoring their consumption, they quickly noticed that they needed help.
Our FinOps experts immediately dove into everyoneINVESTED's Azure costs. Together with our colleagues from Flowfactor, we looked at how to optimize their resources and consumption. But how exactly did we tackle that? Let's go over it together:
To get a clear understanding of their Azure resources and their consumption, we did a thorough assessment. Each time, we look at several different factors:
After our analysis, we immediately started working on the optimizations. For instance, we purchased a couple of resource reservations to reduce their Azure costs. And then we even went one step further.
"To make sure everyoneINVESTED no longer needs to check their Azure consumption manually, we implemented budgets, alerts and persona-based cost management views", says Ken Kenis, our FinOps expert. "Now they get a daily overview of their actual and forecasted costs, so they can quickly intervene when things go wrong.”
We also follow up really closely. "Every six months, we review everyoneINVESTED's Azure costs, together with Flowfactor", Ken continues. "That way no one gets any nasty surprises.”
“Since we sat down together to proactively track our Azure costs, we've only grown more satisfied with Arxus", says Geert. "The longer we know each other, the better things go." And the biggest selling point for everyoneINVESTED? The infinite pool of experts within De Cronos Groep.
"We get one invoice, from the organization we are in contact with on a daily basis. But if we're facing a particular problem, we can fall back on an entire network of specialists", Geert continues.
"And, if we need advice, we know the people at Arxus also have our back.”
With our Advise service we take care of the optimization and management of your Azure environment, from A to Z. Ready to get the most out of it? Contact one of our specialists for free.
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