Dhan’s Online Stock Trading Platform Outpaces Industry Benchmarks with 5–6x Faster Trade Execution on AWS

Dhan is a modern technology–driven stock trading platform in India offering comprehensive trading and investing services. Owned by Raise Financial Services, Dhan aims to elevate the online trading and investing experience in a nation with over 48 million active online traders. The platform boasts over 950,000 active customers, who use the platform to buy and sell stocks, exchange-traded funds and mutual funds, or trade in futures, options, commodities, and other regulated products and assets.

Dhan’s founders aimed to create a seamless online trading experience by integrating order, risk, and execution management into a unified platform. Alok Pandey, cofounder and CTO at Dhan, explains, “Traders in India encounter friction from using multiple platforms for analysis and trade placements. Placing large-quantity trades or multiple orders simultaneously has often been time-consuming and cumbersome.” For optimal speed, the Dhan team set out to develop DEXT, an integrated platform with in-house order, risk, and execution management systems, rather than buying these systems from third parties or vendors.

To support this vision, Dhan needed a cloud infrastructure that could provide low latency and immediate scalability for the sudden influx of traders at market open or on days of extreme market volatility. “Once trading begins, we can expect a hundredfold jump in the number of concurrent customers online,” says Pandey. “We must be ready for that—maintaining the performance, reliability, and security everyone expects.” In addition, Pandey and his team needed a reliable way to connect Dhan’s cloud environments to India’s stock exchanges. “Under financial regulations, this has to be done through on-premises routers,” Pandey adds.

Dhan built its platform on AWS, whose cloud services comply with India’s financial services regulatory bodies. Pandey found that AWS Direct Connect provided secure, dedicated links between Dhan’s cloud infrastructure and stock exchanges across India. “With AWS, we could set up an active-active DR [disaster recovery] infrastructure,” he explains. “That way, if anything happened to our production systems at the main site, we would switch seamlessly to our DR location without any downtime on the platform, ensuring a seamless experience for its traders and investors.”

Developers at Dhan chose to host its custom order management system (OMS) and execution management system (EMS) on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. The team also used Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL for application databases and later transitioned to Amazon Aurora for enhanced scalability, speed, and operational efficiency. “Switching to Amazon Aurora made noticeable differences—such as reducing replica provisioning from over 30 minutes to just 5, cutting cold-start latency to under 20 milliseconds, and enabling automated failovers in under a minute—all of which contribute to a faster, more resilient trading experience,” Pandey states. The Dhan team employs AWS Auto Scaling to dynamically optimize performance, plus Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances to reduce costs by 40 percent by reserving instances for 6-hour trading windows. Serverless AWS Lambda deployments improve the efficiency of specific tasks, such as triggering alerts, processing small data batches, and managing compliance workflows.

Using Amazon CloudWatch and AWS Systems Manager, the Dhan team continuously monitors system health and performance and identifies and resolves bugs on the fly, minimizing disruptions to user experience. “By working closely with the AWS team and using FinOps dashboards, we can monitor and plan infrastructure usage efficiently, ensuring we block the required resources—particularly during peak trading hours—for a seamless experience,” comments Pandey.

Meanwhile, platform administrators use AWS Security Hub to track best practices for server health and mitigate cyber risk. “With our in-house OMS hosted on AWS, we’ve implemented over 150 risk checks on every order, using real-time compute capabilities on Amazon EC2 to maintain a secure trading environment,” Pandey says. “In the last 12 months, we’ve reported zero technical glitches resulting from our AWS infrastructure.”

To enhance customer experiences, the Dhan team has recently deployed Amazon Bedrock to create a generative AI–powered chatbot for context-aware responses to user queries. With the assistance of AWS Professional Services, the team built a proof of concept for the chatbot service using Amazon Bedrock with Anthropic Claude as the large language model for training. “Our chatbot service on Amazon Bedrock is resolving at least 60 percent of customer questions compared to 33 percent with our previous solution,” says Pandey. “It's freeing our call center agents to answer more calls.”

Running the OMS and EMS on Amazon EC2 instances has simplified workflows at the beginning and end of trading sessions, reducing processing times and increasing execution speed. Pandey says, “Powered by AWS, the DEXT platform processes 40 percent of orders in under 10 milliseconds, 90 percent in under 20 milliseconds, and 95 percent in under 25 milliseconds. Dhan’s performance is nearly five to six times faster than typical industry standards and benchmarks.” Meanwhile, the platform’s internal and external APIs both maintain response times ranging from 1–5 milliseconds.

Dhan’s user base quadrupled in 2024, which Pandey credits to the platform’s fast and reliable performance on AWS. Furthermore, platform revenues surged by 675 percent, propelling Dhan into India's top 10 online stockbroking services. Pandey says, “With our critical tech stack operating on AWS, customers experience lightning-fast performance on a single platform to optimize their trading strategies.”

The platform has also received several awards, including the ‘Best-in-Class Fintech’ product in stock trading at the Global Fintech Festival, as well as recognition from TradingView, a global charting and trading platform, as the ‘Best Broker in Asia Pacific’ and the ‘Best Options Trading Platform’ globally. Deloitte India also honored Dhan with the Technology Fast 50 Award in the ‘FinTech’ category for 2024. This, too, according to Pandey, is thanks to the flexibility of the platform’s infrastructure.

Pandey says, “We’ve been able to address many traders’ pain points with innovative features that we’ve developed quickly using AWS.” These features include order slicing, which traders utilize to execute large orders almost instantly; Scalper Mode, designed for traders looking to capture small price changes in assets; and Power Trade Mode, which gives mobile app users a desktop-like experience. He concludes, “Our journey illustrates what’s possible when user experience meets technological innovation on AWS. At Dhan, we’re proud to lead the way in creating a brighter future for traders.”