Kenversity Sacco is used to going where no Sacco has gone before. That’s what makes it a pioneer and an example to its industry. Its latest move is to the cloud. Kenversity walking together with Computer Revolution Africa Group expects that having their Disaster Recovery site in the cloud will reduce future costs, scale to support rapid growth, enhance security, and increase availability, helping achieve its “zero failed interactions” vision for member service.
Think of an industry that’s moving rapidly to the cloud, and financial services probably won’t be the first to come to mind. Nor should it be. Financial services companies face a massive web of privacy, security, and regulatory issues around maintaining customer data, which many in the industry feel is inconsistent with doing business in the cloud.
So why is Kenversity moving its operations to the cloud as fast as it can? Possibly for the same reason that, according to Kenversity, it was one of the first credit union back in the 1976 to venture in the saving and lending industry. According to Charlton Kefa, Chief Technology Officer at Kenversity Sacco, the answer is that the organization is always trying to find new and better ways to use technology to deliver great service to its members. This continuing mission was probably inevitable, given that Kenversity’s members are keen on the ever emerging and changing financial trends in the market.
Beyond the cloud’s lower cost, Kenversity gets built-in scalability and extensibility without having to overbuy hardware to meet peak demand times. It also gets a more agile procurement model, spinning up servers in a couple of hours rather than a couple of weeks.
“Computer Revolution Africa Group (CRAG) doesn’t just work with the largest banks and bank regulators,” says Charlton. “They bring us, our peers, and the regulators we need to work with together for joint discussions on how to make the cloud work for all of us. CRAG sees strategic value in that. So do we.” CRAG is confident that, with the move to Cloud, Kenversity will achieve its “zero failed interactions” vision.
Kenversity is eliminating not just unplanned downtime, but planned downtime too—including a two-hour nightly service window for scheduled maintenance, and core upgrades that can take up to 10 hours at a time.
Kenversity is eager to share this vision with other credit unions—and other credit unions seem equally interested to learn about.
