How Okra is using top-level browser automation with Browserless [Case Study]

Okra, whose mission is to digitize financial services for Africa, is an operating system for financial service platforms of all sizes — from startups to multinational banks who use Okra to build their digital financial platforms & services.

Okra helps businesses in different ways. With Okra, financial firms can:

• Build full digital banking services to scale.
• Match customers with sustainable loans in real-time and lower default rates;
• Build tailored finance management experiences for each user with their financial information;
• Leverage bank-to-bank payments to boost conversions and increase revenue.

As you can imagine, Okra connects to a huge amount of external tools. For smooth work, they need to automate those workflows.

So let's dive deeper into how the Okra team implemented Browserless to do that:

Fara Ashiru Jituboh, Co-Founder & CEO @ Okra has joined us to share a few quick thoughts on how Okra has implemented Browserless in their business. We hope it sparks some ideas for how Browserless might help your service in a similar way. Let’s jump into the discussion.

- What problems does Browserless solve for Okra?

When a customer launches the Okra widget in their favorite app we concurrently launch a browserless browser in case the user will use a bank that is integrated via scrapers and return a URL. Once the customer chooses their bank on the Okra widget we use the URL to connect and launch the bank in a tab. We then conclude the scraping process and format and save the data.

- What were you doing before Browserless?

Previously, we were doing this on our own servers.

Why did Okra choose Browserless for automation?

Previously Okra implemented the workflow on their servers, but since with Browserless they are able to re-use browsers, they could increase speeds dramatically.

Thanks for taking the time, Fara! We appreciate the partnership with Okra!

Want to use Browserless for your automation?

If you want to learn more about browser automation and how you can implement it in your business, we highly recommend you to check out our Headless Handbook.

How to get started with Browserless?

There are different ways to use our product.

• Use our online debugger to try it out!

• Sign up for a free account and get an API key. You have 6 hours of usage for free! After that, you can pay as you go, and only pay per second that you use!

• You can self-host for development purposes by using our OpenSource browserless docker image

• If you’ve already tested our service and want a dedicated machine for your requests, you might be interested in signing up for a dedicated account, this works best if you're doing screencasting or have a heavy load of requests since you won’t be sharing resources.

If you’re using one of our hosted services: be that a usage-based or capacity-based, just connect to our WebSocket Secure with your token to start your web automation!

P.S. If you like our content, you can check out how our clients use Browserless for different use cases:

• @IrishEnergyBot used web scraping to help create awareness around Green Energy 
• Dropdeck automated slide deck exporting to PDF and generation of PNG thumbnails
• BigBlueButton, an open-source project, runs automated E2E tests with Browserless

With ❤️ to your automation,

The Browserless team