BENGALURU: Amazon Web Services (AWS) has clinched a multi-year contract for transforming the digital operations of India’s third largest private lender Axis Bank. This is AWS’ largest such contract so far in India’s Banking, Finance Services, and Insurance sector (BFSI). AWS has insurance major Bajaj Allianz, RBL Bank, and HDFC Standard Life as its other big clients in the sector which saw massive cloud adoption, core operations digitization, and enhancement in the real time customer engagement after the outbreak of the pandemic.
Both Amazon and Axis Bank declined to divulge more details on the deal, including its size. The US-based tech giant is now pitted against IBM which counts State Bank of India and HDFC Bank as its major clients in the space. While India’s traditional financial institutions had begun their digitisation efforts a few years ago, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has come down heavily on some banks for frequent outages in their internet banking services, mobile app crashes, and declined UPI transaction.
Analysts point out that partnerships with tech giants to help efficiently handle rising digital transactions, innovate on core processes, as well as build new products, have become imperative in the post-pandemic world. Subrat Mohanty, Group Executive, Axis Bank told this publication that the deal will help address concerns which were earlier flagged by customers as well as the RBI. He noted that in the face of the increasing velocity of transactions, the BFSI industry has taken a very vocal approach here.
“While partnering with AWS, we aim to modernize our infrastructure. We realize that the speed of the ecosystem is much faster now with digital modes of payments like UPI, Fastag, etc, hence there is a requirement to build constant edge-scalable as well as resilient systems. We aim to transition 70% of our infrastructure and applications on the cloud,” he pointed out.
For AWS, drawing big names for its cloud investments in India makes sense. Last year, it had announced an investment of $2.7 billion to build its second AWS cloud region in India in Telangana.