The financial services industry is undergoing a significant digitization effort, and as they progress, scale and resilience become critical factors. The scale they are witnessing, such as the growth of UPI, is mirrored by the increasing number of retail investors entering capital markets. The most effective way to handle this is by modernizing applications, enhancing customer experiences, and incorporating resiliency and security by design, shared Kiran Jagannath, Head – FSI and Conglomerates, Amazon Web Services India and South Asia, in a recent interview with Srajan Agarwal, Senior Sub-Editor of Elets News Network (ENN).
How is AWS supporting the financial service sector in India to accelerate modernization and digital transformation? Could you share some key examples?
At AWS, we’ve had the privilege of working with customers across various sectors, including startups, SMBs, and large enterprises. Among these, we are especially honoured to collaborate with highly regulated industries like financial services, where we support clients in capital markets, banking, insurance, NBFCs, and fintechs. India is rapidly digitising, with financial services at the forefront, particularly in areas like payments and lending. The Ministry of Finance recently announced that UPI has grown at over 44% CAGR in the past seven years, reflecting this rapid growth.
In such a dynamic environment, customers across these sectors primarily focus on security and resilience at scale, where AWS adds significant value. Several key themes drive growth for our customers, including modernizing core systems and data platforms to keep up with the accelerating pace of change. Innovation is critical, too, as today’s customers, accustomed to seamless experiences from companies like Amazon, now expect the same from financial services: 24/7 availability, low latency, and quick resolutions.
We’re working closely with our customers to innovate new products, services, and experiences daily. Our collaboration with Axis Bank during the pandemic is a prime example of how AWS supports innovation. When the country faced strict lockdowns, we helped Axis Bank launch a complete end-to-end digital onboarding process for their credit card products in just a few weeks. This kind of speed and agility, enabled by the cloud, drives innovation across the sector.
How will the financial service sector transform itself as it moves towards generative AI? Also, how do you see it streamlining workflows and driving cost savings across different segments of India?
The last major technological transformation occurred when AWS introduced the cloud. Now, we are experiencing another groundbreaking moment with generative AI, which holds the potential to reshape new experiences and products. But before diving into that, I’d like to clarify AWS’s approach to generative AI, as we took a slightly different path than others in the industry.
AWS recognized early on that generative AI isn’t a ‘winner-takes-all’ situation. We wanted to remain true to Amazon’s core philosophy of providing choice to our customers, so we adopted a four-layer approach in delivering generative AI.
The first layer offers a choice of foundational models through our managed services platform, Amazon Bedrock, which we launched recently in India. Amazon Bedrock allows customers to easily access these models via APIs, enabling them to build applications without being locked into any specific model. Given how quickly generative AI models are evolving, with new advancements every few months, customers must be flexible in selecting the model that best suits their use case. Bedrock delivers that freedom.
We also provide a range of tools and services, such as Amazon Q, which simplifies the creation of chatbot experiences. These tools help drive productivity by offering powerful assistance to developers, making it easier for them to harness generative AI for business value.
For example, one of the largest banks leveraged our Bedrock platform and generative AI to streamline their operations. Using generative AI to aggregate and summarize information from multiple sources, their frontline bankers could quickly access important data without manual effort, allowing them to focus on value-added services like cross-sell. Generative AI essentially removed the burden of repetitive tasks like summarization, empowering employees to focus on more strategic initiatives.
Similarly, Bajaj Allianz General Insurance utilized Amazon Bedrock and our generative AI offerings to create a customer-facing chatbot. This improved internal processes, enhanced the customer experience by enabling clients to query their policies and access relevant features easily.
We’re seeing generative AI’s impact across various use cases, from improving productivity and efficiency to enhancing customer experiences. Independent software vendors, like Intellect Design, are even integrating generative AI into high-level tasks such as underwriting, and tapping into new data sources to improve efficiency. Generative AI is transforming areas like IT, productivity, risk management, fraud detection, and more.
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AWS has been collaborating with banks, fintechs, and regulators to foster innovations. Could you share some insights, into these collaborations and how they’re shaping the future of the FinTech ecosystem in India?
We collaborate with various fintech companies in India, including Zerodha, ACKO General Insurance, and Razorpay in the payments space. Many of our customers are leveraging AWS cloud services to build secure and resilient solutions for both retail and business clients.
To support these fintechs, especially new-age startups, we offer a variety of programs like AWS Activate, which helps them build effectively on AWS and deliver their services to the market. In addition, we’ve another significant initiative called Speed Connect, which we also enabled as part of the FSI Symposium. This program connects startup innovators with our enterprise customers, fostering collaboration and helping startups offer their innovations to the enterprise segment. We see great synergies between these two groups, with startups driving a lot of innovation. Through AWS, we ensure they can do this quickly, safely, securely, and at scale, while also facilitating connections with enterprise clients to help these innovations reach end customers.
What role does AWS play in helping financial institutions enhance their customer experience and meet the evolving expectations of their clients in this rapidly evolving digitizing environment?
Financial Services companies are undergoing a significant digitization effort, and as we progress, scale and resilience become critical factors. The scale we’re witnessing, such as the growth of UPI, is mirrored by the increasing number of retail investors entering capital markets. One of the immediate needs is to handle the growing digital engagement by enhancing customer experiences. For instance, as I mentioned before with Axis Bank, many customers leverage AWS to build new experiences through net and mobile banking using native services that allow them to scale efficiently as their businesses grow.
Wibmo, a PayU company, PayU, for instance, moved its Protect platform to AWS. This platform supports 130 banks across 25 countries, showcasing the immense scale involved. With the help of our partner, Rapyder, this migration was completed in less than just six months, enabling greater scale, resilience, and efficiency. Additionally, they realized over a 50% reduction in application response time 40% reduction in transaction costs, demonstrating that beyond delivering better customer experiences, we also help our clients drive significant efficiencies in their market approach.
As Indian banks and FinTech continue to adopt cloud technologies, what are some notable success stories where AWS has played a pivotal role in their growth journey?
Several key players in the FinTech space, like Yubi, RING, have all experienced significant growth on AWS, and we’re proud to have partnered with them. On the enterprise side, I’d like to highlight ICICI Lombard, one of the largest general insurers, which migrated its entire application system to AWS. This transformation included moving their core policy administration, over 110 applications, 600+ servers, and more than a thousand terabytes of data in less than a year, showcasing the large-scale migration happening on AWS.
In other areas, FreeCharge, a subsidiary of Axis Bank, is leveraging our Hyderabad region for disaster recovery (DR) strategies and resilience. AWS’s Mumbai region launched in 2016, and in 2022 we followed up with the Hyderabad region, allowing customers like FreeCharge to reduce their DR costs by over 50%. They also achieved a 60% cost reduction using NoSQL databases and brought down overall AWS billing by 22%. This migration scale enables customers to digitize their data, bring digital experiences to life, and leverage data platforms to offer differentiated services.
One final example is Max Life, which uses AWS to offer personalized policies at lower premiums and improve its research capabilities, helping it design new customer experiences. Across the board, whether in banking, fintech, or insurance, AWS is helping companies deliver better experiences, develop innovative products, and enhance efficiency through rapid and effective digital transformation.
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How does AWS plan to innovate further and collaborate with the financial service sector to ensure continued digital transformation and meet industry demands in the future?
As I mentioned, we are working closely with customers to ensure they successfully adopt AWS at scale. To support this, we’ve been heavily investing in upskilling since 2017. We’ve trained over 5.5 million people in India, ensuring they can adopt emerging technologies like generative AI. To make this transition even more accessible, we offer free and low-cost training programs. Additionally, we aim to train 2 million people globally on generative AI by the end of 2025.
Second, our partners play a crucial role in this journey. They are force multipliers for us, and to support them, we’ve introduced the first generative AI competency program, enabling partners to scale their solutions for customers confidently. Through these efforts—working closely with customers, investing in skill development, and empowering our partners—we are continuously driving success and innovation on behalf of our customers.
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