How KreditBee simplified media experiences with ImageKit

In the rapidly expanding Indian fintech industry, KreditBee has weathered regulatory changes and a funding winter to emerge as a real success story. ImageKit has been the preferred solution for KreditBee's image optimization, digital asset storage, and delivery to the website, iOS, and Android apps for 4+ years and has been able to play an important role in their growth.

About KreditBee

KreditBee, India's leading online credit solution provider, caters to a vast user base of predominantly young professionals. This includes both salaried employees and self-employed individuals. With more than 9 crore registered customers and over 1.2 crore unique loan customers, KreditBee offers the convenience of personal loans ranging from INR 1,000 to INR 5 lakh, tailored to meet individual requirements. KreditBee was founded in 2018, and in six years has grown to around $700 million in valuation on the back of a $200 million fundraise in 2023. It has built a sustainable, profitable business in a sector that has seen other players struggle.

Challenges at the core of innovation

KreditBee’s ambitious mission to democratize credit in India comes with its unique technological and operational challenges.

User journeys on the App are simultaneously complex, and they need to work at a high-performance level to ensure that potential applicants can complete their applications and receive their loan disbursements without breaks in the process. KreditBee also regularly releases new loan products, which have their own unique user flows and need to be supported by the KreditBee app.

Ensuring a high-performance, visually engaging user experience while navigating regulatory requirements and rolling out continual product enhancements demands a robust backend solution that can efficiently handle flows like image and file uploads and PDF manipulations.

The launch of a new lending product with new user experience and flows magnified several challenges in the media delivery process:

Partner logos and other assets were built by various external partners, came in varying formats, compression, and quality, and would have affected the KreditBee app's size and performance.
There was no unified storage which was easy to use and collaborate between KreditBee Design and Tech to create, update, and deliver assets to the App.
As a result, workflows to deliver assets from the design team already involved multiple steps and downloads from Zeplin to a cloud storage, and now would get more complex with partner assets involved.
As an RBI-regulated fintech, KreditBee needed to find a solution with India-based data storage and processing to comply with data sovereignty requirements.

Adopting ImageKit: A single platform, multiple challenges solved

Initially discovered by KreditBee co-founder and CTO Karthikeyan K, the need for a central asset repository with image compression at scale led KreditBee to ImageKit. This solution promised both automated image compression and a complete overhaul of the asset management workflow.

ImageKit included an integrated Digital Asset Management Product where the design team could store and manage all assets. The ready-to-use URL could then be shared with the tech team for incorporation into the App, and all assets were automatically optimized and compressed on delivery.
Multiple file resolutions could be created in real-time with ImageKit's image optimization and transformation APIs, saving the need to create numerous variants of assets. ImageKit's automatic format conversion and automatic quality optimization capabilities would let KreditBee's App deliver the right quality and format of an image based on multiple factors, including browser support. The real-time URL-based transformations API helps convert one master image to different resolutions in real-time. This would be a significant effort-saving action for their dev team, letting this focus on supporting product launches. Automatic delivery and optimization is also crucial to enable Kreditbee’s App to have a fast loading time and a seamless user experience. Users would be completing complex flows as part of the loan disbursal process, and a fast app directly impacted completion rates and loans disbursed.
With an integrated CDN in ImageKit for faster delivery, KreditBee would not need to use a separate CDN and could simplify its tech stack.
ImageKit provided a storage and processing region within India to meet compliance requirements.

An initial pilot was done with a few bulky images and the app performance was tested on phones with a poor internet connection and then deployed live in production.

ImageKit proved its mettle, prompting its integration across KreditBee’s entire digital ecosystem. What was meant to solve a specific use case quickly became central to the entire KreditBee tech stack.

Results

Streamlined Workflows
Prior to ImageKit, KreditBee’s asset management was a lengthy process involving multiple steps, from design asset breakdowns in Zeplin to delivering assets via cloud storage. ImageKit streamlined this process, enabling designers to upload assets directly to the ImageKit Media Library and share the final URLs of optimized assets with the Tech team to incorporate into the App.

Improvement in workflow for KreditBee after implementing ImageKit

This eliminated multiple upload + download steps in the workflow, improved discoverability and tracking of assets through ImageKit Media Library analytics, added consistent automated compression to all assets, and prevented duplication of assets across design and development repositories.

Scaled delivery and improved app performance
After four years of growth together, ImageKit now manages a repository tens of thousands of assets in size, with dozens added every day. KreditBee delivers terabytes of data every month through ImageKit, with all assets automatically optimized. An efficient and scalable workflow that accommodated their product innovation, automatically optimized and compressed delivery of correctly resized media, along with other improvements by KreditBee, led to an improvement in app load time by a few seconds. KreditBee has since substantially evolved their App and codebase to achieve even higher performance milestones.

With ImageKit's automatic optimization and transformations, KreditBee has built an efficient and scalable workflow for media on its apps and websites, helping improve not just the loading performance and user experience but also the team's operational efficiency.

- Karthikeyan K, Co-founder & CTO, KreditBee

Looking ahead: Innovation continues

ImageKit’s unified API, which allows the optimization and delivery of images and video, opens up many new opportunities for KreditBee. These include exploring the usage of video within the App and further speeding workflows between design and tech by utilizing ImageKit DAM’s more advanced sharing and collaboration functionalities.

Conclusion

Through its partnership with ImageKit, KreditBee not only tackled its media delivery challenges but also elevated user experience and operational efficiency. This successful collaboration is a testament to the significance of choosing the right technology partner to drive business growth and innovation amidst the dynamic and ever-evolving market landscape.