HDFC Securities Scales Investing App to Millions of Traders on AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced today that HDFC Securities Ltd., one of the leading investment service providers in India, launched its new mobile trading app, HDFC SKY, on the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. HDFC Sky serves 75 million customers and all HDFC Group companies, investors, and traders worldwide with user-friendly trading of shares, commodities, futures, currencies, initial public offerings (IPOs), mutual funds, and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). To make trading more transparent and accessible for investors, HDFC SKY operates on a flat pricing model, charging traders a consistent, predetermined fee, regardless of the amount of money they invest or the number of transactions they make. With AWS India as its preferred cloud provider, HDFC Securities is providing a secure, stable, and low-latency trading service for the growing number of tech-savvy retail investors who prefer mobile trading. Built on AWS, HDFC SKY gives investors access to the stock market at a scale of thousands of transactions per second. With AWS, HDFC Securities will reduce its annual IT infrastructure and management costs by up to 50% compared to using on-premises infrastructure.

Retail investors now account for 36% of total trading market share in India. HDFC Securities’ with on-premises infrastructure wanted to scale with the rapidly increasing number of transactions generated by these trades. To ensure consistent high performance of HDFC SKY and give customers a seamless and fast trading experience, HDFC Securities migrated its core workloads to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which gives companies the flexibility to start, run, and scale Kubernetes applications in the cloud, HDFC Securities built new mobile trading services, like HDFC Sky, across equities, derivatives, commodities, IPOs, bonds, and U.S. investing, to help customers grow their wealth. With Amazon EMR, a cloud-based big data service, and Amazon Redshift, a cloud data warehouse, HDFC Securities can securely analyze trade information on HDFC Sky and provide customers with risk management data, like margins and positions, to make faster trading decisions. Leveraging the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region and the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region, HDFC Securities benefits from increased performance, security, reliability, and scale to ensure business continuity and disaster recovery while meeting data residency preferences and data protection levels required in the financial services industry.

“AWS helped us to create a culture of builders within HDFC Securities by enabling us to rapidly experiment at a lower cost so that we can innovate on behalf of our customers,” said Sandeep Bhardwaj, chief operating and digital officer at HDFC Securities. “Our commitment to provide a seamless user experience is our top priority, and thanks to the scalability and reliability of AWS, we have effortlessly catered to a rapidly expanding customer base of tech-savvy investors. We are pleased to have significantly reduced our time to market for pioneering services like HDFC SKY, empowering us with the agility to lead the market and help our customers build wealth."

HDFC Securities is looking to harness the power of machine learning (ML) on AWS to serve its customers better, by offering more personalized and tailored experiences. The company is also looking at intelligent document processing pipelines to improve customer onboarding and servicing experiences by using AWS’s generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) offerings.

“The financial services industry in South Asia is adapting rapidly using cloud technology and AI to cope with surging demand from sophisticated retail investors,” said Vaishali Kasture, director and country leader, Commercial Sales, AWS India and South Asia. “HDFC Securities can scale resources with demand and has the tools to build an evolving suite of innovative investor services with AWS. In addition, by leveraging our AWS Mumbai and Hyderabad infrastructure Regions, India’s leading financial services provider can meet the regulatory compliance, disaster recovery (DR) and data protection requirements it needs to continue innovating securely.”

AWS has a long-term commitment to customers and local communities in India, and has invested US$3.7 billion (INR 30,900 crores) in the country between 2016-2022. AWS has launched two Regions in India, the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region in 2016, and AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region in 2022. AWS plans to invest US$12.7 billion in India by 2030 in local cloud infrastructure, bringing AWS’s total investment in India to US $16.4 billion (INR 1,36,500 crores) by 2030. These investments are a catalyst to accelerate innovation and drive productivity, which will contribute an estimated US$23.3 billion (INR 1,94,700 crores) to India’s total gross domestic product (GDP) by 2030. AWS has also trained more than 4 million individuals in India with cloud skills since 2017.

Transitioning to renewable energy is one of the most impactful ways to lower carbon emissions, and in 2022, 90% of the electricity consumed by Amazon was attributable to renewable energy sources. As the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in the world, Amazon has announced more than 400 renewable energy projects worldwide and is on track to powering its operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025. Amazon has invested in six utility-scale renewable energy projects in India, three solar and three wind-solar hybrids, with a combined renewable energy capacity of 920 megawatts. These renewable energy projects will supply energy for Amazon’s corporate offices, fulfillment centers, and data centers in India.