In an increasingly competitive environment, financial institutions strive to provide a seamless, innovative and personalised service to their customers, but are often challenged by their legacy infrastructure that fails to sustain the requisite scale, efficiency and speed. Future success demands banks to strategically rethink their back-end technology.

Axis Bank, India’s third-largest private sector bank by assets, is embarking on a transformation journey that rearchitects its technology foundation and primes its digital channels for future business growth. Avinash Raghavendra, the bank’s president and CIO,  discusses recent key initiatives and how the bank is striving to be future ready.

Raghvendra stated that traditionally, Axis Bank’s digital channels were monolithic, requiring significant individual development efforts around data and business logic. The bank opted to decouple the architecture, implement microservices and migrate to cloud-based infrastructure. This was essential for scale and resiliency of its digital channels as well as for the success of emerging technology initiatives in artificial intelligence. 

Axis Bank strategically prepared for this transition of workloads into the cloud, ensuring consistency and scalability on both on-premise and cloud environments, as well as the reusability of the business   layer. It incorporated an integration layer that could work on-prem, on cloud and across different cloud service providers. 

The bank partnered with Red Hat for its OpenShift system. Raghvendra noted: “OpenShift allowed us to become cloud agnostic and prepare us for vertical scaling. The development efforts that we have been able to replicate for other journeys as well have reduced by at least 40%. The operational costs of managing one single software layer have also come down dramatically.” 

The bank had originally adopted OpenShift on its mobile channel and has now deployed it into its retail and corporate internet banks as well. 

He shared that every new development on customer-facing channels is now hosted on the cloud. Going forward, the bank plans to have 70% to 75% of its customer-facing applications on cloud.

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