Building a robust financial platform to serve India’s investment market

Recognizing a significant opportunity to serve India’s burgeoning retail investment market, Kotak Investment Advisors Ltd., a subsidiary of Kotak Mahindra Bank (Kotak), launched Kotak Cherry as a one-stop digital investment platform to reimagine wealth management. Built with Kotak’s domain expertise, Cherry provides curated and holistic investment solutions catering to an investor’s short- and long-term interests through stocks, bonds, mutual funds and other financial products.

“We intend to create a seamless experience that can attract and cater to digitally native investors who are savvy and prefer making digital transactions,” says Rohit Murarka, Chief Business Officer of Kotak Cherry. “We also wanted an efficient investing ecosystem that will serve holistic needs of an investor, irrespective of their journey or preferences.”

“Building an in-house digital platform was borne out of our vision to provide a robust, secure and open architecture platform, so we custom built it and own the IP,” says Vishal Bhatia, Chief Technical Officer of Kotak Cherry. “Unlike many financial services that use on-premises systems, we designed Cherry to be 100% cloud-native to take advantage of containerization, microservices, technology updates and the scalability that cloud offers.”

He continues: “Soon after launching our website, Kotak Cherry had to address a range of technical issues that impeded performance. The biggest issue was stability—site outages occurred on a regular basis. We worked together with IBM to stabilize the system and reduce it to a single digit a day. It has assisted in a ‘customer wow’ experience and trust.”

For every minute the Cherry website was down, it was losing critical customers. Time was of the essence in bringing stability to the platform. The IBM Consulting® Services team, including Hybrid Cloud Management’s senior enterprise architects and other experienced professionals, co-created a stability strategy with Kotak Cherry management to make the platform stable, resilient and ready for growth.

The plan of action started with stabilizing application management services and application performance. Next came an end-to-end assessment of the architecture and a revamp of the architectural design. These transformative steps led to more user-friendly journeys and improved customer experiences, as well as better reporting of site performance.

“With a lot of support from IBM, we improved the stability of the application,” says Bhatia. “They helped us with architecture, web development and back-end development. They also helped us clean up the code base, write API wrappers for third parties, implement a circuit breaker and move into containerization.”

IBM Consulting worked on architecture scalability with focused solutions such as serverless technologies and other technologies that use resources more efficiently, including Quarkus. IBM also helped migrate older solutions to alternate and appropriate cloud services.

The Kotak Cherry platform operates 100% on AWS Cloud. “I saw that IBM has good architectural knowledge and that the delivery team brought us the right resources,” Bhatia says. “When we had a challenge in hand, we trusted IBM to overcome it and support our business team.”

Along with the stable performance of the website and smoother transitions between pages, Cherry is seeing more customer stickiness. “Now, we can keep adding new products to the platform,” says Bhatia. “This will enable customers to benefit from the full multi-asset offering of our platform.”

To be prepared for business growth, Kotak Cherry has adopted digital technologies such as DevOps and a microservices-based architecture that is elastic, resilient and ready to meet the demand of a hyperscaler. “We are working with the IBM team on scalability,” Bhatia says. “So, when we have 10 times more traffic, our system will be ready to reliably manage the load.”

Since re-engineering its digital platform to ensure stability, Cherry has seen significant performance improvements. As of March 2023, these include: 

• Eliminating outages and delivering 100% up-time
• Reducing service tickets by 99% since inception 
• Enabling the onboarding of 2,000 new customers per day

“Our site performance has been much superior to what was before and the product is performing the way it is supposed to,” says Murarka. “After actively promoting the Kotak Cherry app, we’ve had over three million new downloads and new registrations have been on a very good upward slope.”

With the stability of the AWS Cloud-based Cherry platform assured, Cherry has the scalability to support rapid growth. “Even at the fast pace at which we have grown during the last several years, our market penetration levels are still low,” says Bhatia.

“With the growth of personal income in India, there is a big runway ahead of us,” says Murarka. “Now that the architectural improvements are in place, we are well positioned to benefit from this cycle and will be able to go for an order of magnitude of growth.”  

Launched in 2020, Kotak Cherry (link resides outside of ibm.com) is one-stop platform for retail investors in India to buy stocks, bonds and many other assets. Cherry also provides tools, news and insights to help customers on their investment journey and is part of Kotak Investment Advisors Ltd., which has raised, managed or advised in transactions valued at over USD 5.7 billion across different asset classes.