BankBazaar

BankBazaar Migrates to AWS for Faster Innovation and Builds Video-Based KYC App in Two Months

2022

A comparatively low credit card penetration and evolving financial inclusion, combined with the rapid development of internet networks, make India a prime location for fintechs such as BankBazaar. The business issues co-branded credit cards and provides services such as free credit score checks and personal financial management tools for about 50 million users across the country.
 
As a fast-growing operation with ambitious expansion plans, BankBazaar could no longer rely on physical infrastructure running in a colocated data center. The business was restricted by costly, inflexible capacity planning and server provisioning while IT team members were diverted from solving problems and innovating by infrastructure management and administration tasks.
 
Vijay Santhosh Rao, vice president of Engineering at BankBazaar, says, “We had to undertake a lot of IT firefighting, and this prompted us to ask why a business of our size was still in a colocated data center. We wanted to scale capacity as required rather than adding infrastructure resources based on prior planning and estimates.”

Driving Technical Alignment with AWS

BankBazaar was already working with Amazon Web Services (AWS), using Amazon Redshift cloud data warehouse to run some analytics data stores. However, a pre-cloud era regulatory regime restricted its ability to migrate fully. As multinational cloud providers, including AWS, educated regulators and banks about their security measures and broader ecosystems, the regulatory environment changed.
 
BankBazaar saw an opportunity to take full advantage of the cloud’s agility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness and decided to evaluate AWS Cloud and another multinational cloud provider. “We opted for AWS due to our existing experiences with Amazon Redshift and our technical alignment. From a production perspective, this would make the transition easier,” says Murari Sridharan, CTO at BankBazaar.
 
The business also wanted to use independent services tied together in the same Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) and security structure—a crucial difference between AWS and the competitor. Additionally, the widespread AWS knowledge and skills in India would make hiring skilled people comparatively easy.
BankBazaar
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With AWS, we can share the risks around the sensitive data that we hold. There is a level of security infrastructure AWS provides that gives us peace of mind.”

Vijay Santhosh Rao
Vice President of Engineering, BankBazaar

Going Live with a Kubernetes Cluster in 3 Hours

When a Kubernetes cluster running on an in-house infrastructure crashed, the BankBazaar technology team knew it had made the right decision. After attempting to revive the cluster for about an hour, the team opted for the AWS Cloud via a virtual private network (VPN) as a makeshift solution, which immediately solved its stability problem. The team then elected to move the cluster to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and went live in just 3 hours, which prompted BankBazaar to accelerate the move of its entire in-house infrastructure to the AWS Cloud.
 
BankBazaar began intensive work on the migration in March 2021 and was impressed by the professionalism and support of the AWS account management team. Krishnenjit Roy, senior vice president of Technology at BankBazaar, says, “AWS was our equal partner in this whole project. The team took stock of our entire workload and presented a proposal that included cost savings and optimization, which helped seal the deal.”

Migrating 78 Systems in One Month

BankBazaar completed its migration in December 2021 and by the following month, the business went live with 78 systems running on AWS. AWS Direct Connect provided a connection between the colocated data center and AWS, which proved invaluable as it required a hybrid environment for nearly nine months.
 
The business opted to rewrite and redesign its applications and systems where required to modernize and optimize the AWS Cloud. In addition to Amazon EKS, BankBazaar sources compute through Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) while Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) provides the primary sensitive data storage for a number of services. Amazon Keyspaces—a scalable, managed Apache Cassandra–compatible database service—supports services at the top of the customer journey funnel that experience high traffic volumes, and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MariaDB operates as the organization’s primary database.
 
As a data science company, BankBazaar leverages Amazon EMR to gain a single, unified view of its customers. Amazon Redshift is the cornerstone of the business’s data analytics strategy and supports the analysis of customer events, behavior, and information to deliver services such as financial product recommendations based on credit policies and applicants’ creditworthiness.

Decreasing Latency from 5.5 Seconds to 3 Milliseconds

To protect its customers’ sensitive financial data, the business uses AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to manage account access. Rao says, “With AWS, we can share the risks around the sensitive data that we hold. There is a level of security infrastructure AWS provides that gives us peace of mind.”
 
The move to AWS also led to a decrease in average latency from 5.5 seconds to 3 milliseconds. Furthermore, it reduced its average load times to just 0.09 seconds. And the stability and availability issues that the business previously experienced in its colocated data center have disappeared, with the current availability at 99.9999 percent. Sridharan says, “I was pleasantly surprised with the results that we were seeing from the migration and the consistent optimization to enhance our network performance. We couldn’t have done that easily with our previous environment.”

Building a Video-Based Know Your Customer Application in Two Months

With AWS, the business can focus on its core functions rather than on the lower end of the technology stack where it does not have domain expertise or resources. “By offloading infrastructure and management to the AWS Cloud, we can release updates and new products and services much faster,” says Sridharan.

One innovation launched in July 2020 is BankBazaar’s video Know Your Customer (KYC) application. Before the pandemic, regulators in India required banks to physically meet customers before onboarding them. When video was allowed as an alternative to physical meetings, BankBazaar built its video KYC application on Amazon Kinesis, in just two months.

Venkatesh Jayaraman, Vice President Engineering at BankBazaar, concludes, “Building our video KYC application consisted of two parts: the foundational piece, which supports audio and video, and the customer onboarding process for the KYC and how to do it seamlessly. With our foundation in AWS, we were able to solely focus on the customer journey instead of worrying about the infrastructure.” 

Learn More

To learn more, visit aws.amazon.com/products/databases/migrations.

About BankBazaar

BankBazaar is a fintech in India that provides co-branded credit cards and online credit and finance content for 50 million registered users.

Benefits

  • Reduces average latency by 82%
  • Migrates 78 systems in one month
  • Achieves 99.9999% availability
  • Develops and launches video KYC solution in two months
  • Reduces load times to 0.9 seconds
  • Stabilizes failing Kubernetes cluster with move to cloud

AWS Services Used

Amazon Redshift

Amazon Redshift uses SQL to analyze structured and semi-structured data across data warehouses, operational databases, and data lakes, using AWS-designed hardware and machine learning to deliver the best price performance at any scale.

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Amazon EMR

Amazon EMR is a cloud big data platform for running large-scale distributed data processing jobs, interactive SQL queries, and machine learning (ML) applications using open-source analytics frameworks such as Apache Spark, Apache Hive, and Presto.

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Amazon Kinesis

Amazon Kinesis makes it easy to collect, process, and analyze real-time, streaming data so you can get timely insights and react quickly to new information.

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Amazon Keyspaces

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) is a scalable, highly available, and managed Apache Cassandra–compatible database service.

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