Axis Bank inks multi-year deal with AWS for powering digital banking services

Puneet Chandok, President (Commercial Business), AWS India and South Asia, Amazon Internet Services Pvt Ltd (AISPL) said digital transformation for banks is no longer an initiative but it's becoming the only way to thrive and serve customers better every day. AISPL is a local legal Indian entity that acts as a seller for AWS services in India.

He cited various reports to state that India has the highest fintech adoption in Asia (87 per cent) and that 59 per cent of Indian consumers in metros are willing to move to a digital-only bank in the next two years. "The picture is clear that consumers no longer only expect but they demand personalisation, they demand convenience, and they want an enhanced user experience which is improving every day," he told reporters.

Talking about the partnership with Axis Bank, Chandok said AWS is helping build a secure foundation for digital at the bank, driving innovation, and migration and core modernisation. He noted that cloud technology is transforming not just the financial industry but other sectors as well.

"Virtually every business segment in India, we are seeing re-invention happening, driven by the cloud. Be it insurance, banking, manufacturing, media and discontinuities like this, push all of us to step back and change," he added. Financial services customers across banks, insurers and fintechs are increasingly running business critical applications on AWS, where they started their journey with small workloads, but have now moved more business critical applications to the cloud.

Subrat Mohanty, Group Executive at Axis Bank said over the last 18 months, the organisation has been working with a very specific focus on making Axis Bank, the best digital bank in the country. About 73 per cent of its customers are digitally active, 73 per cent of FDs opened are opened digitally and over 800 people are working on digital projects, he added.

"In the course of last six months, we are starting to see the results…about 50 million-plus daily transactions that actually happened on the app. If you see our customer footprint over the last 24 months or so, it has really exploded," he added. Axis Bank has over 200 million customers who increasingly demand new and innovative digital banking services, including digital deposits, digital loans, and digital credit cards, to better manage their finances.

Last year, Axis Bank made the decision to deploy all new customer facing applications on AWS. While 15 per cent of the bank's applications are already on the cloud currently, the bank aims to take this number to 70 per cent in three years. "We are committed to investing in India and the intent is to put the power of AWS Cloud directly into the hands of our customers and partners, so that they have the tools to really experiment, innovate and deliver impact at scale in India," Chandok said.

He added that the investments are directed towards strengthening its technical support teams, building capabilities and infrastructure to support its growth in the country. Leveraging AWS' solutions, Axis Bank has built new digital banking products using microservices that support any application architecture, irrespective of scale, load, or complexity.

For example, the bank has built fully digital offerings which include its LEAP savings account with a virtual debit card, its NOVA online current account, and OLIVE, its credit card engagement platform that has serviced more than 3.5 million users since its launch less than two months ago. 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).