Axis Bank modernizes its customer digital journeys on AWS

In today’s digital-first world, streamlining the customer onboarding journey in retail banking is crucial for business growth and customer acquisition. Banks understand the need to shift their focus from product-centric to customer-centric origination. By prioritizing the customers’ needs and preferences throughout the digital onboarding process, banks can create a foundation for stronger relationships, cross-selling opportunities, and ultimately, sustainable business expansion.

In this blog, we explore how Axis Bank, the third largest private-sector bank in India in terms of total assets, addressed these challenges by building digital products on AWS; transforming their New to Bank (NTB) and Existing To Bank (ETB) customer service journeys and making the entire process paperless. Axis Bank’s Digital Business and Transformation (DBAT) team drives the digital transformation initiatives across various product offerings at the bank.

Approach of hollowing the ‘Core’

Onboarding new customers or introducing new feature to an existing customer in any bank involves interaction with the bank’s core IT systems. To scale the onboarding process and offer innovative digital banking services in an agile manner, Axis Bank needed to modernize its core system. Generally, the core systems are highly complex, as they are tightly integrated with various other systems in the organization for different functions. Introducing changes to such systems requires in-depth analysis of the system integrations.

By hollowing the core strategy, banks can gradually replace or update components of their core systems without disrupting critical operations, allowing for more agility and innovation.

‘Prior to our digital transformation, customer activities were largely facilitated through the bank’s internal applications that were tightly integrated with the core systems responsible for processing those tasks. Recognizing the need for a more modular and decoupled architecture, we set out to build digital products that could provide self-service capabilities to customers.

Identifying this as a key strategic priority, Axis Bank adopted an approach of “hollowing the core” – modernizing the essential core IT systems that power our operations, while simultaneously building out a suite of digital products and services. This allowed us to decouple the customer-facing experiences from the underlying core systems, enabling greater agility and responsiveness to evolving customer needs. AWS helped in building a cloud-native digital customer onboarding & self-servicing journeys using a modular approach and the solution includes channel apps catering to different device form factors. More importantly, the set of microservices which interacts with the core banking systems and the end users are completely decoupled and it offloads many key activities which were earlier carried out by a monolithic platform.

This principle was followed to build the digital customer onboarding & self-service journeys for a number of retail banking products such as LEAP (Savings account), JUNO (Salary account), SUPERNOVA (Current account for individuals and sole proprietor) & OLIVE (Credit cards).

As shown in the figure below, we built the digital onboarding application and the backend microservices on AWS for a number of retail and commercial banking products. These services cater to both NTB and ETB customer journeys. The service categories shown below are indicative and not an exhaustive list. These services securely interact with the on-premises hosted core systems via the enterprise service bus.

Figure 1: Logical architecture of digital products

Olive – An Overview

While there are a number of digital products built by the bank, in this blog post, we will focus on the credit-card lifecycle management application, Olive, which is used by customers for credit card self-service features. Olive was built to improve the customer experience by bundling multiple service journeys with straight-through processing (STP) capability, which eventually leads to better turn-around time (TAT) metrics.

Olive app offers the following services to its credit card customers:

1. Credit limit increase: Based on personalized offers received by the customers, they can instantly increase their credit limit.
2. Convert to Easy Monthly Installments (EMI) journey: Allows the customer convert the eligible high-value transactions to EMIs and even club the EMIs for multiple high-value transactions to simplify the EMI payment and tracking.
3. Upgrade credit card journey: Uses a STP journey for eligible customers to upgrade their credit card based on the personalized offers available.
4. Instant loan journey: Bank’s personalization engine often sends out instant loan offers to both NTB & ETB users. Olive app facilitates this instant loan journey for both NTB & ETB users with zero paper work.
5. Bill payments: These are facilitated through Bharat Bill Payment System (BBPS).
6. Benefit dashboard: Customers can see all personalized offers in a single dashboard.

In addition to above service offerings, Olive also helps the bank in meeting the mandated regulatory requirements while dealing with credit cards:

• Availability of digital credit card: While the physical card delivery is being processed, a digital credit card is made available to the customer in the Olive app for any card transactions.
• Key fee sheet: Discloses all service charges and fees associated with the credit card.
• EMI amortization view: Lets the customer track all their active loans and EMIs on Olive.
• Transaction limit management: Allows the users to manage/control the daily card usage/transaction limits.
• Online statements: Credit card statements are made available online via Olive.

Olive Tech stack

We have adopted a standard tech stack on AWS to build these digital customer journeys which makes it easy for us to roll out deployments at a much faster pace. All Internet traffic to our public-facing applications go through our fortified demilitarized (DMZ) network which has all the necessary security controls deployed to provide protection from network(L3) to application (L7) layers. We also leverage AWS Shield Advanced for DDoS protection.

To meet our service SLAs, we have deployed our Olive application stack in a multi-AZ mode so that the application runs across two availability zones to be highly available. The application frontend is served via Amazon CloudFront with static web page stored on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and we have nginx running in high availability (HA) mode on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. We use Nginx to do path-based routing, offload SSL certs and even handle a few header parameters in the requests. All our microservices are running on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) using EKS managed worker nodes and the pods are auto-scaled as needed.

Figure 2: Deployment architecture of Olive stack on AWS

We needed a lightweight API server which could give us the flexibility to customize the routing logic and implement certain custom security controls, so we ended up building a customized API server in-house. Our middleware consists of a custom-built API server and several microservices to handle specific activities such as checking for personalized offers, card upgrade eligibility, credit limit extension eligibility, setting usage limits etc.

The API server acts as a gateway for all API requests and has all the business logic to process the incoming service calls, perform user authentication, enforce payload encryption for Personal Identifiable Information (PII)/sensitive data and orchestrate calls to multiple microservices. API server even facilitates all interactions/service calls to on-premises core systems to complete specific actions. The API server and all the microservices run on Amazon EKS in HA mode with multiple pods spread across two availability zones (AZ). We use EKS Cluster Autoscaler to scale our cluster compute nodes and the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) to scale our EKS pod deployments dynamically to handle the traffic spikes and be able to handle millions of API calls every day.

The Olive application uses Amazon ElastiCache Redis OSS as user session store to make the application stateless. In addition, there are critical flag variables that are maintained on Redis store. For instance, whenever there is a planned maintenance activity, a flag is set on Redis to show a banner to the user indicating the maintenance window.

Our microservices deal with a lot of nested JSON objects, so we explored multiple document databases and ended up choosing Amazon DocumentDB as our database for these customer journeys primarily because it’s a managed service that offers highly available deployment options with minimal operational overhead. It also offered in-place upgrades as an option which made it easy for our DevOps team to easily manage the upgrade cycles. For a few select customer journeys, the microservices run with its own dedicated DocumentDB.

Many of our services deals with PII and sensitive data so we incorporated payload encryption logic into our applications. This security control in addition to transport layer security (TLS) helps us keep the PII and sensitive data protected in transit.

We encrypt the data at rest using AWS KMS backed by AWS CloudHSM as a custom key store for lifecycle management of our encryption keys. The server-side encryption is enabled on S3, Amazon EBS and DocumentDB using the customer managed keys.

We have also built a data pipeline which copies the data persisted in the DocumentDB to S3 at defined intervals, and that data gets copied to our enterprise data warehouse running on Amazon Redshift. We use Amazon QuickSight to build interactive dashboards for our business users to better understand the state of the business. You can find more details about our BI reporting solution running on AWS in this blog post.

The modular design of these digital products allows the bank to quickly build new features, and scale the solution without any performance impact. The approach adopted in the recent retail credit card customer migration from a large global bank to Axis Bank’s ecosystem is a testament to how these digital products help create innovative customer journeys and can operate at scale.

Credit card user migration – Unboxing journey

As part of our recent acquisition of a large global bank’s India consumer banking business, we had to migrate their India credit card customers to Axis Bank’s ecosystem. We designed and built a new unboxing journey in Olive to facilitate their credit card user migration in a phased manner. As part of this unboxing journey in Olive, card customers of the acquired entity were able to see personalized offers of Axis Bank credit cards, view the card benefits, and even reward conversion from their loyalty platform to Axis Bank edge reward points. The unboxing journey allowed the migrating customers to opt in for Axis Bank credit card offers and made it convenient for them to easily get onboarded to the Axis Bank ecosystem.

We also built relevant business dashboards using Amazon QuickSight to track the progress of customer migration. This entire credit card customer migration was seamlessly handled without any downtime or performance issues in the Olive application.

Scale & business benefits:

Today, our credit card lifecycle management solution sees more than 1 million daily customer visits and handles more than 92 million API requests in a day for credit card-related services. We have been able to easily scale our solution on AWS to handle these growing volumes.

This solution offers more than 15 end-to-end service journeys with zero paperwork, resulting in serving 84% service requests digitally, 80% reduction in turn-around time (TAT) of acquisitions journeys, zero incidents of not-first-time-right (NFTR), and led to 67% of cross-sell/up-sell via digital channels.

Conclusion

By building these digital banking experiences in a robust, cloud-based infrastructure, we have been able to rapidly onboard new customers and empower them with a suite of self-service capabilities. These digital products, built on AWS, have helped the bank to positively impact their customer experience. It has improved the speed & ease of onboarding, allowing customers to buy new products and services. It has also made self-service accessible for customer at their fingertips in a seamless manner.

While this blog post detailed the Olive stack, these design principles and approach remain fundamental and is replicated to all digital offerings across various product categories. Digital products such as LEAP, JUNO and SUPERNOVA are powered by the same foundation which made it easier for a faster rollout across the product lines.

Through this holistic digital transformation, Axis Bank has been able to significantly expand its customer base and deliver exceptional experiences tailored to evolving consumer expectations.