Cycloan is a decentralized loan marketplace for tech SMEs and startups to secure working capital financing for their business needs through larger tech companies (as the primary source of funds). When the primary source of funds is insufficient to meet funding requirements, Cycloan can offer access to financing from individuals and institutional lenders as an alternative source of funds. The marketplace is blockchain-enabled, which creates a transparent and secure ecosystem, eliminating the need for any third-party interventions.

For a FinTech-based company like Cycloan, security is a key component for ensuring business success. Cycloan needed a reliable cloud provider that is strictly compliant with regional and international security standards. However, its existing deployment architecture did not have built-in redundancy and high availability. Furthermore, for the blockchain component of its application, Cycloan needed a built-in system that could provide many nodes, but its existing architecture did not support the setup of various nodes for each party.

Cycloan eventually chose to partner with Alibaba Cloud, based on the following advantages:
- Deep knowledge of doing business in Asia
- Competitive pricing
- Excellent business and technical support
- Faster time to market
- Fast transaction processing and low latency
- High availability

By adopting Alibaba Cloud solutions, Cycloan is now more confident to scale up as they open up new markets in the APAC region. Now, Cycloan can get scalable instances for its frontend applications, and its middle layer has been implemented as a scalable component. In addition, its blockchain database has been deployed with many nodes for different parties, capable of spinning up new nodes on the fly. The security of its applications has also been well monitored and protected by Alibaba Cloud’s threat monitoring score.

Financing businesses can only be profitable if sound decisions can be made through data. For Cycloan, data is a key ingredient that must be accurate and immutable. To achieve this, its solution ingests large amounts of data from approved sources using API integration to make critical credit decisions.

To improve credit decision-making, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) is used to train the credit model. Cycloan is also very conscious of minimizing operational risks and fraud by digitizing the entire lending workflow through smart contracts.

In particular, Cycloan leveraged the following Alibaba Cloud products in its solution: Blockchain as a Service: To develop trust in the entire lending lifecycle, data integrity is assured from the Anchor, and smart contracts help avoid distortion of "truth" for the entire lending lifecycle. Function Compute: By having a serverless frontend serving the web application, valuable tech resources can be freed up from performing extensive O&M. ApsaraDB RDS: Cycloan takes advantage of Alibaba Cloud's fully managed database service to focus on its business without worrying about maintaining the database system. Elastic Compute Service (ECS): Cycloan uses ECS instances to simplify deployment and improve the scalability of application servers.

Cycloan believes it can start small and scale up as its Sino-China business grows through its partnership with Alibaba Cloud. Cycloan appreciates Alibaba Cloud's constant support and effort to make the cooperation a seamless process. This is especially important for the company when facing a constantly evolving business landscape.