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Financial services company Enova employs over 1,100 people and provides online-based loans to over 3 million people worldwide. Enova has been named a top employer for Gen-Y Emerging Talent in the Chicago area by Brill Street. They also earned a spot on ComputerWorld’s 100 Best Places to Work in IT in 2013.
Despite size and success, CTO Fred Lee said Enova is relatively unknown in Chicago’s digital startup scene. But through Enova's tech, he is working to change that by supporting monthly meetups for ChicagoRuby, JavaScript and Postgres. (Did you know his team works on one of the largest applications of Ruby and Rails in the U.S.?)
When he's not running the technology branch of the international company, Lee said he's checking out the Chicago restaurant scene - notably Little Goat in the West Loop, where he recently spent is 40th birthday. Or, he joked, running around Costco with his three kids.
Which technologies power Enova and which technologies are playing the biggest roles at the company in 2014?
Technology covers our entire business. We’re completely on the web, so everything and anything that happens in our business goes through our technology. Our technology stack is a lot of open source stuff. On the operating system side, we’re running Debian (Linux); we run Postgres on the database side; we run Rails as a web framework; Ruby is our programming language, but we also use HTML, CSS and Javascript. We build everything in-house, so we have a big, large-scale Ruby on Rails application.
This year, we’re making a move to change over to Rubinius. Rubinius is Ruby, but it’s running on a different virtual machine interpreter. We get certain benefits out of that, to that extent we’ve hired the actual maintainer of the Rubinius project, Brian Shirai.
Another big technology initiative that we are going to take a real hard look at is moving to the cloud. Currently we run everything in our own data centers. The biggest motivator for looking at the cloud would be that as we expand the business globally, we want to get our technology closer to the customer and improve their experience by reducing latency and other potential issues. We can either build a data center where the customer is located, which causes certain problems for us; or we can leverage something like Amazon AWS or other similar cloud providers that have already done that build-out, and we can just use their platform. The other reason is that, from a scaling out perspective, it’s a no-brainer. Again, we can hire people to go build a data center, or we can put our systems on something that is already built. That’s what we will be taking a look at this year.
I am frequently asked, “Why don’t you already do that?” When the company was first started, Amazon AWS didn’t exist, Heroku didn’t exist, and there was no Rackspace. These things weren’t an option. In order to run our Rails application at the time, we had to build our own infrastructure.
How do you manage Enova's fast growth?
It’s a constant balance because growth is necessary for the business, the company and the organization, but with every bit of growth you do, it comes at a cost. You have to balance all of that together. The way we do that is by focusing a lot on onboard training, making sure that we hire the right people. If you get the right people, the growth is easier to manage. Things like culture are really important. While it’s really hard to scale out and tell everyone specifically what to do, it’s much easier to provide a framework around what’s valuable, what our values are, and what we care about. Then people are empowered to figure out what to do. That’s the better way to scale out growth.
What trends do you see happening in the financial services tech scene over the next three years? How are you driving those trends?
One is mobile. I don’t think that is necessarily just a “fin-tech” thing, but it is a thing everywhere. For us, we’re seeing mobile traffic rise year after year, and it’s significant because it tells us a lot about how our customers use our products and our technologies. From a technology perspective, it’s a real paradigm shift because our technology was built with the basic assumption that our users and customers are sitting at a desktop with a browser open. We are constantly shifting our technology for new devices.
Second – and I’m not sure if this is a tech trend or if it’s just a trend in the industry – but products and offerings become more customizable to the customer. That’s very non-traditional as you start to think in terms of a bank or a large financial company. Tech is enabling this to happen. Our tech allows that. We can’t imagine a scenario where our tech was built in such a way that it locked us into a particular thing, and the fact that we’re not built on that kind of platform helps us.
What sort of role does data play at Enova?
So one of the things that Enova is founded on is data and analytics driving decisions. Many people use the phrase “data-driven thinking,” but I like to use the phrase “data-empowered” thinking. I picked that up from the Hubspot CTO Dharmesh Shah at a conference. Whereas data-driven implies putting on your blinders and only looking at the numbers, data-empowered implies that our numbers and our data inform our decision-making, but that there’s room for gut and intuition. I feel like companies do one or the other: they either rely a lot on gut intuition, or they rely a lot on data. Mixing the two is really important. That’s something that we’ve been really successful at. When we talk about strategy for the company and products, we are always looking at the data, but we are never putting on our blinders.
