AnandRathi Innovates “at Breakneck Speed” on AWS

Investors often check their portfolios first thing in the morning, anxious to view how their assets have moved overnight. Waiting around for reports to download is not a viable option. Especially for the firm’s high net-worth clients, time is money. Number crunching is much faster on the AWS Cloud, with Amazon EMR  at the heart of AnandRathi’s big data processing.

Critical asset calculations are now performed 50 percent faster. With a completely new architecture built on top of AWS Lambda, asset reports are generated in a few seconds, down from 15 minutes on premises. This helps retain high-net-worth clients with busy schedules.

Clients and internal stakeholders such as wealth advisors are also benefiting from improved performance on AnandRathi’s service portals. AnandRathi has implemented Amazon CloudFront for low-latency content delivery on its websites and mobile app, and feedback has been positive. Most of the firm’s clients interact with their portfolios via mobile phones, so creating a consistent user experience across platforms was important. Operations team members now experience up to 40 percent faster navigation on internal sites, which has dramatically improved their productivity and ability to respond to client requests.

Though the firm manages assets worth several billion US dollars, AnandRathi’s Wealthtech division runs with a nimble engineering team of 50. The team is now juggling more projects than people, thanks to the automation possible using managed services such as Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).

Since its inception, the firm had been using a proprietary database, but it found that open source and AWS cloud-native databases offer the same—or better—performance for less engineering effort. “Amazon RDS is a great solution because we don’t have to invest precious engineering bandwidth in maintenance,” Sen says.  

To support its innovation agenda, AnandRathi has adopted an agile continuous delivery model. Every Friday, something goes into production, which the firm believes is key to retaining its edge in light of today’s dynamic business environment. “It’s a very tight ship and we can only run it this way because we rely on AWS services to keep us moving. Without AWS, it would take at least double or triple the time to get things to market,” Sen says.
Engineers at AnandRathi are encouraged to experiment and innovate, but experimentation is cost-controlled, with budgets set on a daily basis. Management, as well as engineering team members, have visibility into line-item costing so they can understand how much was spent on what projects each day. Since migrating to the AWS Cloud, the firm says engineers have a healthier appreciation of the total cost of ownership their applications incur. If a design requires a massive budget, chances are higher that it won’t be approved, which pushes teams to find more efficient means to the same end.


AnandRathi’s positive experience with AWS extends beyond the company’s technology team. According to Amit Rathi, managing director at AnandRathi, “We are focused on building world-class technology solutions that can scale. Accuracy and scalability are at the heart of everything we do, and by using AWS and several of its off-the-shelf solutions, we can further our agenda significantly.”