CUSTOMER STORIES
BluNova Transforms Data-Driven Insights into Product Innovation and Scalable Micro Lending
With Cortex AI, BluNova slashes product development time and scales AI cost-effectively to provide financial services to South Africans.
Industry
Financial ServicesLocation
South AfricaStory highlights
- Innovating products in mere months: Rather than spending a whole year on product development, the team reallocated infrastructure management to Snowflake. It spends fewer resources keeping pipelines alive and can focus on delivering products at a previously unimaginable pace.
- Maximizing cost efficiency with usage-based data and AI pricing: BluNova has continued to expand new capabilities and use cases thanks to Snowflake’s pay-as-you-scale commercial model — eliminating the need for heavy upfront infrastructure investment while ensuring financially sustainable growth.
- Unlocking financial access for two-thirds of South Africans: With Cortex-driven insights, BluNova created BluAdvance, a micro-lending business offering cash advances, credit scoring alternatives and emergency electricity advances to the two-thirds of South African consumers who previously had no access to formal financial services.
Video Transcript
Two-thirds of the South African population actually don't have access to credit-type services and financial services. Blu Label as a group is really focused on making a difference in the lives of South African consumers by bringing these services to them. With this, we start to generate a whole lot of transactional insights on this consumer, and that's where BluNova comes to the fore. Our goal is to extract insights from this data, but actually monetize this data and enhance their ability to better serve the South African consumer.
We started off with a bunch of full-stack developers. We were spending a lot more time really managing technology as opposed to actually creating value out of data. Pipelines started to fail. So for us, nothing drove the change more than the world around us starting to crash.
Now with advancements like Snowflake’s native Cortex, BluNova has the ability to create revenue and generate insights, and understand whether there's any value in the data. We can focus on business value as opposed to focusing on the technology. Now we're focusing a lot more on actually what is the product that we take to the consumer and how does the consumer benefit from it. From idea to actual generation of product, we've actually taken and cut down a traditional dev cycle from a year to a couple of months.
From a cost-saving perspective, what's really cool about the commercial model behind Snowflake is it scales as you use. Even as we start to use new pieces of the system, we really don't have to put in any more investment to do so.
The data and the insights from Snowflake have led us to a point where we could create a little business called Blu Advance on the back of this. Blu Advance is effectively a micro-lending business that focuses on taking product and cash advances to the South African consumer. One of our flagship products we took to market is that of emergency electricity advance, which is very topical and contextual to the South African landscape.
Having the ability to create a micro-lending alternative or a credit-scoring alternative really allows us to start to pull people into this formal part of the ecosystem. Doing so means that you've bettered their lives. You can wake up each day knowing that you've made a difference to the lives of somebody and that person can now do more going forward.
We want to work much closer with our subsidiaries within the group to enable them to actually create further value for the products and services they take to market. With platforms like Snowflake, the ability to do so is at our fingertips.
