Axis Bank strikes cloud computing deal with AWS for digital transformation

India's third-largest private sector bank to migrate 70% of its on-premises data centre infra in next 24 months to further reduce cost, improve agility, improve customer experience

Amazon Web Services, (AWS), the cloud computing arm of e-commerce giant Amazon said that Axis Bank, India’s third-largest private sector bank, has selected AWS to accelerate its digital transformation program and meet the growing demand for its digital banking services.

As part of a multi-year agreement, Axis Bank will draw on the breadth and depth of AWS services. This includes containers, database, and compute, to build a portfolio of new digital financial services to bring advanced banking experiences to customers. This includes online accounts that can be opened in under six minutes and instant digital payments, helping the bank increase customer satisfaction by 35 per cent and lower costs by 24 per cent.

“Cloud is transforming the financial industry,” said Puneet Chandok, President, Commercial Business, AWS India and South Asia, AISPL. “We are delighted to help Axis Bank build and grow a suite of digital banking services that evolve with technology changes, introduce new payment modes, and support evolving consumer and business needs in India.

Experts said that AWS is ramping up its capabilities and competing with global rivals, such as Google Cloud, Microsoft, and Alibaba, to dominate cloud computing services.

By selecting AWS as their preferred cloud provider, Chandok said Axis Bank gains access to the deepest and broadest suite of cloud services to rapidly innovate and introduce new financial services. These range from easy account opening, digital lending, and instant payments for customers and businesses.

“We believe AWS will enhance our agility and resilience to manage two key features that define our digital business – rapid scale and high velocity,” said Subrat Mohanty, Group Executive, Axis Bank.

To date, Axis Bank 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, Account Aggregator, Video-Know Your Customer (V-KYC), and WhatsApp Banking. Axis Bank also plans to migrate 70 per cent of its on-premises data centre infrastructure in the next 24 months to further reduce cost, improve agility, and improve customer experience.

“We aim to transition 70 per cent of our infrastructure and applications on the cloud,” said Subrat Mohanty, Group Executive, Axis Bank. Mohanty said Axis Bank is designing new products, crafting digital journeys, and personalizing its services to address the financial needs of its customers better. “We continue to anticipate future trends and make investments ahead of time within our technology stack,” said Mohanty.

Axis Bank has over 200 million customers. They are increasingly demanding new and innovative digital banking services. These include digital deposits, digital loans, and digital credit cards, to better manage their finances. To serve these consumers’ needs and provide new financial services digitally, Axis Bank relies on the scalability, resiliency, and agility of AWS to bring new services to market quickly while maintaining a seamless, excellent customer experience.

Using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which gives customers the flexibility to start, run, and scale Kubernetes applications on AWS or on-premises, Axis Bank built new digital banking products. It did this using microservices that support any application architecture, irrespective of scale, load, or complexity. For example, the bank has built fully digital offerings. These include its LEAP savings account with a virtual debit card, its NOVA online current account. Also, there is OLIVE, its credit card engagement platform, which has serviced more than 3.5 million users since its launch less than two months ago.

Using Amazon DocumentDB, a durable, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service, Axis Bank runs secure financial transaction processing across its digital bank accounts. Using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud, Axis Bank will scale workloads on-demand to support 10 million daily real-time payments through India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI). This ensures reliability and consistent performance. Last year, Axis Bank made the decision to deploy all new customer-facing applications on AWS. Today, 15 per cent of the bank’s applications are already on the cloud, and the bank aims to take this number to 70 per cent in three years.

Axis Bank believes building a cloud-native, design-centric engineering capability is critical to its success. To achieve this, the bank has dedicated over 800 people to its digital projects, built an in-house engineering and design team of more than 130 people. It has also established a cloud engineering practice centred on agile software development and DevOps principles.

Working with AWS Professional Services, a global team of AWS experts help customers achieve their desired outcomes with the cloud. Axis Bank has set up a cloud centre of excellence to accelerate its cloud migration and set the digital foundation for innovating new services. The firm said it is meeting strict governance, security, and regulatory compliance requirements.