Case Study: Capfin achieves up to 85% faster BI reporting and improved database performance with Pure Storage

Capfin Handles Ever-Increasing Loan Volumes Thanks To Pure Storage

Capfin is a South African personal‑finance lender handling about 150,000 loan applications a month (databases totaling ~3.5 TB) and peaks of up to 3,000 transactions/sec with as many as 1,000 call‑center agents hitting SQL Server databases simultaneously. Legacy storage had become the primary bottleneck, causing high contention, long processing times and slow BI reporting despite other optimizations; an initial all‑flash POC from a legacy vendor produced no meaningful improvement.

Capfin moved production onto a Pure Storage FlashArray//M20, which removed backend bottlenecks and delivered consistent sub‑millisecond latency. The change eliminated database contention, sped call‑center and loan‑processing response times, cut some BI reports from 3–4 hours to about 30 minutes (up to 85% faster), reduced a main daily SQL job from ~300 to ~130 minutes, produced 30–40% performance gains even without tuning, achieved ~5:1 data reduction, and simplified management so IT can focus on strategic work.

Capfin

Riaan Swart

Database Administration Manager