Case Study: Aella App achieves improved identity verification and rapid scaling to 200,000 customers with Amazon Web Services

Aella Credit Uses AWS to Improve Identity Verification and Grow Its Business

Aella Credit is a Lagos-based fintech that provides mobile loans to the underbanked across Nigeria, the Philippines, and the US. The startup struggled with unreliable infrastructure and manual identity checks—there is no real-time government ID API in Nigeria—resulting in duplicate profiles, slow verification, and a need to eliminate downtime for a money-handling service.

Aella migrated its loan platform to AWS, running on Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS for MySQL, storing images in Amazon S3, and using Amazon Rekognition for automated face and ID matching. The move raised face-verification accuracy by about 40%, delivered zero system downtime, and enabled rapid scale—growing the customer base from 5,000 to 200,000 in a few months—letting the team focus on product innovation.

Aella App

Wale Akanbi

Chief Technology Officer