Scaling Secure Fintech Innovation: How InCred achieved scale and operational efficiency with Docker

Introduction

InCred Group is a diversified financial services firm headquartered in Mumbai, boasting a workforce of over 3500+ employees and 170+ branches across India. Founded in 2017, InCred set out to deliver inclusive finance to underserved sectors in India. The group comprises three distinct businesses – ‘InCred Finance’ which is a new-age lending-focused NBFC; ‘InCred Capital’ which is an integrated institutional, wealth and asset management platform and ‘InCred Money’ the integrated B2C and B2B2C digital investment distribution platform targeting mass-affluent and retail segments. Given the complexity of its operations, the need for operational resilience and scalability was non-negotiable.

The tech team, headquartered in Bangalore, supports several business units and maintains a shared infrastructure platform. Despite its lean size, this team is responsible for building and deploying over 80 microservices that serve hundreds of thousands of users across India every day.

Challenges

The Challenge: Fragmented Systems, Audit Pressure, Developer Friction

By 2019, what began as a monolith had evolved into a sprawling microservices architecture. Managing 80+ services across seven programming languages became a source of friction. Local environment mismatches, dependency conflicts, and ad hoc provisioning delayed delivery and eroded confidence.

“We started with one application that worked – until it didn’t. Managing 80+ services across 7+ languages and frameworks without containerization wasn’t just hard. It was unscalable.” – Dheeraj Arani, Head of DevOps

At the same time, security, compliance, and regulatory expectations soared. InCred Finance operates under constant scrutiny from the external and internal reviews. At any point in time, there is at least one audit happening. The need to quickly answer questions around image provenance, change approvals, and infrastructure access prompted the team to formalize processes.

Scaling development while meeting audit requirements and ensuring resilient delivery pipelines had become the defining challenge.y.

Solution

Solution Overview: Docker as the Engine for Secure Velocity

After briefly looking into alternatives, InCred chose Docker to standardize and scale its development operations. Docker’s extensive documentation, functionalities, and strong community support were key for the decision-making process. With Docker, InCred achieved targeted benefits across three key pillars:

1. Developer Productivity

Docker Desktop became the local environment of choice, enabling fast, reproducible setups for all developers. Docker Compose allowed microservices to be orchestrated in development exactly as they run in production, eliminating environment drift.

Developers could now test services locally, validate ideas instantly, and ship code that mirrors production conditions, all without depending on centralized provisioning. GitHub was tightly integrated for CI/CD, allowing every commit to flow through a Docker-based pipeline and reach production within three minutes.

“The turnaround time from commit to deployment is just three minutes on average across our 50+ backend applications. It’s a hard metric we track, and one we were able to achieve after adopting Docker.” – Dheeraj Arani, Head of DevOps

2. Stronger Software Supply Chain Security & Regulatory Compliance

With Docker Business, InCred implemented centralized access controls – including SSO enforcement and auditable logs, ensuring that all image and registry interactions are permissioned and auditable. Docker Scout brought embedded vulnerability scanning into Docker Desktop, allowing developers to surface and remediate dependency risks early in the development process. Local enforcement was further strengthened by Kubernetes-level OPA policies, creating an end-to-end compliance and security framework.

Hardened Docker endpoints reduced attack surfaces on developer machines, while proactive governance tools transformed InCred’s supply chain from reactive to secure-by-design. As a result, InCred has successfully passed multiple audits with zero infrastructure violations, crediting Docker’s role in enabling a trustworthy, observable, and compliant DevSecOps pipeline.

“Docker gave us more than containers. It gave us control. Now, every developer has a consistent, secure environment, and we ship confidently every day.”
– Dheeraj Arani, Head of DevOps, InCred

3. Infrastructure Cost Efficiency Through Containerization

By adopting Docker and shifting to a container-native architecture on AWS, InCred has dramatically improved infrastructure efficiency. The company now runs over 80% of its cloud workloads on spot instances, a level of cost optimization rarely achieved in the Indian fintech landscape. This was made possible by Docker’s role in enabling stateless, resilient services that can seamlessly restart and scale across availability zones. With containers as the foundation, InCred designed applications for fault tolerance and elasticity—unlocking massive savings without compromising reliability or performance.

Measurable Impact

Results

Docker as the Blueprint for Resilient Fintech

For InCred, Docker became more than a development tool – it became the foundation for secure, scalable growth. From unlocking developer autonomy to meeting audit demands with confidence, Docker enables InCred to deliver secure finance at the speed of digital expectation.

InCred’s journey also showcases a thoughtful evolution. Initially on Docker Teams, they quickly recognized the need for tighter control and user management, leading to an upgrade to Docker Business. Now with built-in SSO and access management, Docker usage is regulated and secure at scale. Developers rely on Docker Scout for real-time insights into security risks during local development, and new services can be deployed faster than ever.

The roadmap ahead is equally ambitious. InCred is preparing to adopt Docker Hardened Images and Docker Build Cloud, with expectations to further reduce build times and enhance image trustworthiness. Both initiatives align with their long-term vision: to scale securely, innovate continuously, and operate with confidence in a heavily regulated market.

With Docker, InCred has created a replicable model of secure fintech modernization – one that others in the sector are now looking to emulate.