One of India’s largest private sector banks, Axis Bank, has embarked on a transformation program to help it meet demand for digital banking services, shooting for 70% of its infrastructure and applications to be hosted in the cloud.
Bringing in Amazon Web Services (AWS) for a “multi-year agreement”, Axis said it would adopt services such as containers, database, and compute, to build a portfolio of new digital financial services for its 200 million customers.
“Axis Bank is designing new products, crafting digital journeys, and personalising its services to address the financial needs of its customers better,” Axis Bank group executive Subrat Mohanty said.
“We continue to anticipate future trends and make investments ahead of time within our technology stack. We believe AWS will enhance our agility and resilience to manage two key features that define our digital business — rapid scale and high velocity.”
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Axis Bank will be leveraging the cloud giant’s services to deliver online accounts that can be opened in under six minutes, and enable instant digital payments, it said.
To date, Axis has deployed over 25 mission-critical applications on AWS, including a buy-now, pay-later product and a new loan management system to support it, an account aggregator, a video-know your customer (V-KYC) service, and WhatsApp banking.
The bank also has plans to migrate 70% of its on-premises data centre infrastructure over the next two years. Last year, Axis Bank made the decision to deploy all new customer-facing applications on AWS; today, 15% of the bank’s applications are on the cloud, with the bank aiming to take this number to 70% in three years.
Using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Axis Bank built new digital banking products using microservices, with its fully digital offerings including its LEAP savings account with a virtual debit card, its NOVA online current account, and OLIVE, its credit card engagement platform, which has serviced more than 3.5 million users since its launch less than two months ago.
Through the cloud giant’s fully managed document database service Amazon DocumentDB, Axis Bank also runs secure financial transaction processing across its digital bank accounts. Using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), the bank also plans to scale workloads on-demand to support 10 million daily real-time payments through India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI).
The bank said it has dedicated over 800 people to its digital projects, built an in-house engineering and design team of more than 130 people, and established a cloud engineering practice centred on agile software development and DevOps principles.
Working with AWS Professional Services, Axis has also set up a cloud centre of excellence.
