INDmoney's INDstocks trading engine delivers sub-20 milliseconds order processing

Trading platforms in India must deliver millisecond-level precision so investors can act quickly on price changes. As soon as a price tick is received from stock exchanges, it needs to be delivered instantly to avoid missed opportunities. Surges in trading activity during major financial events make scalability essential, while the sensitivity of financial data makes security critical to maintain customer trust.

INDmoney, a personal finance and global investing platform, set out to address these challenges by expanding into near real-time trading. In 2023, it launched INDstocks, a platform designed to give Indian traders and investors a simple, secure way to trade and invest in the share market. The app combines advanced charts, automated tools, and low-latency execution to help users make fast, informed decisions. “Our users need millisecond-level precision so they can make fast decisions about the right prices for placing trades,” says Kausal Malladi, senior vice president and head of engineering at INDmoney.

INDmoney built INDstocks on AWS to meet its requirements for speed, scalability, and security. The company already relied on AWS for its broader back end and trusted it could support the stringent needs of a trading platform. To process trades quickly, INDstocks uses Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, which scales through multiple readers to support peak loads when markets open, and tens of thousands of trades are placed at once. AWS Multicast groups distribute price ticks simultaneously to all services without extra hops, reducing latency, while web socket servers behind an AWS Network Load Balancer scale automatically. AWS Auto Scaling adds further flexibility by adjusting resources during unpredictable traffic spikes.

Performance is also enhanced globally with AWS Global Accelerator, which routes user traffic over the AWS Global Network to the closest and best-performing endpoint. “AWS Global Accelerator was a game-changer for us because it helps the INDmoney App run much faster, especially for users from tier-2 and tier-3 cities in India,” Malladi explains. Running across multiple AWS Availability Zones provides resiliency and high availability to maintain uptime even during infrastructure disruptions.

Security was integrated into the development process from the start. INDstocks uses Amazon GuardDuty for continuous monitoring, AWS Secrets Manager for secure credential storage, and Amazon Inspector to scan for vulnerabilities. “Security is everything. We can’t afford to lose customer data at any point,” Malladi says. “We integrated security into every layer of the architecture. It was a fundamental part of the development lifecycle, not an afterthought.”

Ashish Kashyap, founder of INDmoney, adds, “Fastest order placement, fastest price display, and fastest withdrawals—that focus is the most important part of our technology strategy on AWS.” 

INDstocks delivers a low-latency trading experience that supports faster decision-making. “Because of AWS, we are one of the fastest trading systems,” says Malladi. “We deliver price ticks from the source (exchanges) to end-user devices in under 50 milliseconds, and process orders in under 20 milliseconds at peak, even while concurrently processing multiple in-house risk checks.”

Withdrawals to bank accounts settle in about 3 seconds, giving users near-instant access to funds. The platform scales smoothly during market surges—serving close to 1 million ticks per minute on a typical day and handling up to 40 percent spikes during major announcements that affect financial markets—without performance bottlenecks.

This speed and reliability have fueled business growth. INDstocks has more than doubled its share of trading volume on the Indian Stock Exchanges in the last six months. “We have a strong focus on performance, reliability, and speed, and we’re confident AWS will help us continue to meet those goals,” says Kashyap.