The project
Puntored is a Colombian fintech company that helps drive the growth of independent businesses by providing financial services through innovative applications, offering virtual products and transactional services at numerous points of sale. Puntored began operating in 2004 as a business focused on electronic mobile top-ups and became a technology network supported by a robust platform capable of carrying out and offering payment services nationwide. It was founded by Andrés Albán, the company's current CEO, who was recognized as an Endeavor entrepreneur in 2012 and won the MIT “Innovators Under 35” award in 2014.
Andrés Albán, founder and CEO of Puntored, says, “We are a company that makes life easier for millions of people at the base of the pyramid by giving them access to financial services. We also generate additional income for thousands of shopkeepers across the country.” Puntored's success lies in its financial inclusion service, which promotes the digitalization of the economy. This is no easy task, but it is precisely what PuntoRed has achieved throughout its 14-year history nationwide, expanding to Puerto Rico and planning to continue its expansion into several Central American countries in the coming years.
In 2014, the US magazine MIT Technology Review organized a forum in Medellín, Colombia, on Colombia's most innovative ventures in entrepreneurship and complex foundational technologies: nanotechnology, the challenges of medicine, and the Internet as a platform for society's growth. On that occasion, Conexred received one of the ten “Innovators Under 35” awards for the project “Electronic payment and collection network for unbanked, low-income people.” This recognition provided further motivation for Puntored to expand its presence in the country by developing technology solutions dedicated to growing and strengthening financial inclusion, especially for small businesses, so they can develop their businesses through technology and access to financial services.
Puntored currently has around 72,000 locations that completed approximately 300 million transactions in 2018, and expects to have more than 500,000 merchants connected through its Mi Caja service in the near future.
The challenge
In 2016, Puntored and Servinformación formed a partnership with the idea of taking the data generated by consumption of the different products offered in neighborhood stores (the traditional channel) and turning it into information that provides a detailed understanding of sales behavior, while enabling shopkeepers to strengthen customer loyalty through these new processes and gain a more comprehensive understanding of their businesses. For this reason, the Puntored team launched a development project based on Google Cloud Platform infrastructure to store the consumption information recorded by shopkeepers and generate statistical analyses of sales filtered by the main marketing variables, giving companies a new way to identify consumption opportunities to implement their marketing strategies. The challenges involved in this decision include defining the processes, including the technology, for capturing data from the traditional channel and how this data will be structured to process and analyze information consistently, as well as how the analysis results will be displayed for proper interpretation.
The solution
The service is supported by an online platform, Servipunto, which enables fast information access tailored to users' needs while making the most of Google Cloud Platform resources. Servinformación helped define the infrastructure and technical aspects supporting the entire process of information capture, data transformation and analysis, results visualization, and the adoption of best practices for GCP products.
Using products such as Google AppEngine, Puntored deployed the backend that handles sales data ingestion through mobile devices located in traditional retail channels. Cloud Datastore was also used to store transactional information as recorded by shopkeepers, while Cloud Dataflow was used for EL processes and processing. Cloud Dataprep was used for transformation, and finally Google BigQuery supported the analysis process. Tableau is the tool used to visualize the data in an understandable way.
“Thanks to the technology available on Google Cloud Platform, Puntored and Servinformación have strengthened their partnership to develop technology projects that connect both companies' core businesses. This enables small businesses to grow through technology and access to financial services, while advancing the transformation of Small Data into Big Data.”
Sergio Lopez – Vice President of Operations and Technology
