Better Business Banking: How Aiven Helps Lili to Expand and Keep Impressing Customers

For time-strapped small-business owners who often lack financial experience, banking and accounting are often fragmented and frustrating experiences. That’s why Lili, one single platform for your business finances, was created in 2019. Liran Zelkha, Co-Founder and CTO, and Lilac Bar David, Co-Founder and CEO, together established Lili as the first to offer US customers banking, accounting and tax software on one platform. This allows small business owners to independently handle their own bookkeeping without the help of an accountant, and generate profit and loss statements, cash flow statements, expense reports, invoices and tax preparation with just a click of a button.

Zelkha has more than 20 years in the tech industry, which includes periods working as a freelancer, entrepreneur and as CTO and VP for Research and Development at Pepper, the first challenger bank in his native Israel. That provided a wealth of personal experience to draw on when developing the platform.

“We’ve built a platform that enables you to manage your business banking, accounting, invoicing, and tax preparation in one place. This gives the clarity you need as a business owner. Whatever your business goals are, we won’t stop until we help you get there,” Zelkha explains.

Pre-empting and preventing potential problems

Zelkha understands firsthand the needs of his development team. He strives to create an environment where the team can do its best work, and to do so efficiently — to keep Lili’s customers’ banking fees as low as possible.

For Zelkha that means using EverSQL by Aiven, the database optimization software that Aiven acquired in 2023. Powered by AI, EverSQL automatically rewrites and indexes PostgreSQL® and MySQL® queries and helps development teams accelerate their databases.

“We were using MySQL right from the start, and I knew we were going to face performance issues. We were experiencing fast growth so I needed to pre-empt any problems. We looked around and saw that EverSQL was a great solution for us,” Zelkha says.

High standards of performance for demanding customers

Lili’s entire environment and database runs on AWS. The customer-facing part of the application enables business owners to check their bank balance and view transactions in the accounting component. Performance is naturally important — customers want that information immediately, and it’s what distinguishes platforms like Lili from more traditional players. So although the application mostly serves read-only use cases for customers, to ensure they have the best possible user experience, the application needs to load, aggregate and analyze huge amounts of data upon login.

The other aspect of the application handles actions like authorizing and authenticating credit-card transactions. Every swipe of a card and every mobile payment sends a notification to the Lili database. As a result, the database is very large but having a very short response time is still essential.

“If a customer uses their card, our server needs to save the swipe, and then approve or not approve the transaction. If that action takes an additional 200 milliseconds, it means the customer is standing in line for an additional 200 milliseconds. It doesn’t sound like much, but people feel it. They feel the card is slower than other cards. We are just not willing to accept that level of service,” Zelkha says.

Optimizing the database with the help of AI

It means that Lili is dependent on its very large database running optimally at all times. “The way our customers, our application and our database work mean we need something to monitor our performance and to prevent problems before they arise,” Zelkha says. “EverSQL by Aiven automatically identifies and helps optimize SQL performance issues, so they don’t become performance problems.”

As part of the development process, anyone at Lili who writes complicated queries passes it through EverSQL to make sure those queries are optimized before being deployed to production. Zelkha leverages the EverSQL performance insight dashboard to retrieve detailed information about any service performance degradations and uses the automatic recommendations to address them.

The fact that his team can write queries and don't need to spend time on optimization is a real bonus. “They can just drop a query into the UI and get recommendations. And if there are still problems, they go to the data team or to me. But in 95% of the time, they are totally independent,” says Zelkha. “EverSQL by Aiven makes it easier for the developers. It speeds up their work. It’s a win-win relationship for them. They see the value — they love it.”

Notably, there is a key team member absent from the Lili set-up — the database administrator.
“EverSQL by Aiven saved us the need of hiring a DBA”, saya Zelkha. “A DBA’s role is to see problems and to fix them, it’s not to avoid problems in the first place. But with EverSQL by Aiven, our developers take ownership of their SQL queries and optimize them so we save ourselves a lot of issues.”

Future ambitions and a good night’s sleep

For a company of Lili’s size and potential, not to mention its significant growth rate, being able to say that there is no need to worry about the optimization aspect of your architecture is an incredibly powerful statement. “We’re ambitious. We want more customers — and we’ll need to store more data as we do that. So our database size and our use of EverSQL by Aiven will continue to increase as well.”

As for Zelkha himself, the best feature of EverSQL is the reduced stress. “We love EverSQL by Aiven. I love to recommend it. And I love that it gives me a good night’s sleep.”