Finder, Australia’s most-visited financial comparison platform, has selected Google Cloud to consolidate its entire digital infrastructure and build its AI capabilities for consumers.
After migrating to Google Cloud in January, Finder has already managed to slash digital infrastructure costs by over 50%, speed up operations, and increase collaboration throughout its business–laying the technical foundations for a rapid push into generative AI (gen AI) capabilities across Finder’s online properties over the course of this year.
“Google Cloud’s pace of AI development, coupled with its unparalleled capabilities in online search, convinced us that this was the platform to power the next stage of Finder’s journey,” said Joe Waller, CTO, Finder. “Generative AI is front and center in how we aim to help people make even better financial decisions by matching comparisons more accurately with their personal situations, requirements, and constraints. Google Cloud gives us a trusted and transparent environment in which to build out those capabilities at a speed that keeps us ahead of the competition.
Finder plans to use Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform to deliver a more conversational user experience for users to explore, compare and evaluate financial products through its website, and to make it faster and easier for visitors to find the most relevant educational content for their specific financial objectives.
“We’re acutely aware of the need to maintain a technology advantage in the comparison experience that we provide, especially as we look to differentiate ourselves in new markets,” said Waller. “Consolidating our infrastructure on Google Cloud makes it substantially simpler for us to grow fast and work better together, all while keeping our digital infrastructure in peak operational health.”
Empowering teams, eliminating costs
Following its migration to Google Cloud, supported by implementation partner Searce, Finder’s teams are now able to autonomously spin up, manage, and optimize their digital products thanks to the platform’s intuitive user interface and developer tools backed by readily available training resources. Previously, teams had to rely on a small group of IT professionals to administer any platform-related requests, leading to bottlenecks that persistently slowed down innovation.
“With Google Cloud, we’ve been able to distribute once-bottlenecked workloads from one team across twelve, while also empowering those teams to understand and control their own cloud consumption according to their unique use cases,” Waller said. “We’ve always prioritized speed as part of our culture, and the Google Cloud user interface allows our teams to collaborate and create value much faster and with much less friction. Even the platform’s training experience has proven incredibly intuitive and transparent, leading to rapid upskilling and much greater digital awareness across all parts of our organization.”
Finder will also tap on Google Cloud’s telemetry tools, which help in monitoring and maintaining performance across applications, and Google Kubernetes Engine to keep its infrastructure running at maximal efficiency, even as it scales up its plans for global growth. Granular visibility of cloud spend has already helped Finder pare operating costs by automatically identifying and eliminating redundant services at speed.
“Just like we encourage consumers to do with their finances, we ran a top-to-bottom appraisal of our digital infrastructure and identified numerous areas where greater transparency over costs and usage could help us build a leaner, more future-ready organization,” Waller said. “The Google Cloud team has been instrumental in realizing those dividends — we see them as true and trusted advisors in how we not only strengthen our cloud foundations but design AI and generative AI capabilities for our site that put us at the front of the market.”
“Technical debt and siloed processes often frustrate the growth ambitions of even the most agile and digitally transformed companies, especially when it comes to adopting new technologies like generative AI to directly benefit employees and customers,” said Matt Zwolenski, Director & Chief Technologist, Google Cloud Australia & NZ. “Finder’s journey shows the importance of reviewing an organization’s cloud platform and strategy to ensure fit for purpose when it comes to emerging technology.
