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Case Study

About Kotak Mahindra Bank

The Challenges

How It Was Solved

Results at a Glance

Kotak Mahindra Bank’s Words On Our Work

About Kotak Mahindra Bank

Kotak Mahindra Bank is one of India's largest private-sector banks, serving tens of millions of retail and business customers. They offer a flagship zero-balance digital savings product — one of the first of its kind in India — and handle hundreds of millions of transactions every month across lending, payments, and investment products.

As digital adoption accelerated, the bank's infrastructure began showing strain. Not in headline failures — in the kind of slow, consistent degradation that quietly erodes user trust: a balance check that took too long, a payment confirmation that kept users waiting, an app that lagged on salary day.

What We Created for Kotak Mahindra Bank?

AIS Technolabs built a smart caching and auto-scaling system for Kotak Mahindra Bank, eliminating app slowdowns and keeping the platform stable even during their busiest banking hours.

The Challenges

01 — Core banking overloaded by read traffic

Every balance inquiry, transaction view, or portfolio lookup hit the main banking system directly. With hundreds of millions of such requests monthly, simple checks regularly exceeded 2 seconds on peak days.

02 — Infrastructure couldn't absorb traffic spikes

Regulatory announcements, festive campaigns, or viral moments could multiply platform traffic 4x in under 90 minutes. The existing setup had no mechanism to scale gracefully, causing login failures and transaction errors at the worst possible moments.

03 — The app re-rendered everything on every update

Live price and account updates triggered full-screen refreshes even when only a single value changed. During market hours with thousands of concurrent users, this made the app feel sluggish and unreliable.

04 — Payment confirmations reached merchants too slowly

Merchants and small business owners were waiting on confirmations before making operational decisions. Even small, consistent delays drove avoidable support calls and eroded trust in the platform's reliability.

05 — Compliance had to be rebuilt for every new product

Every new product launch — lending, payroll, neobanking — required building compliance checks from scratch. This was slow, inconsistent, and created a growing pile of duplicated code that made future changes riskier.

How It Was Solved

The Problem	What We Built	The Result
Core banking is drowning in read requests	Built a separate read-only data layer using Amazon DynamoDB. A background worker pre-calculates account states and stores them in Redis. Balance checks read from cache. The main banking system handles writes only.	Balance API response time reduced from ~2,000ms to under 250ms. Core banking read load eliminated.
Infrastructure failing under sudden spikes	Rebuilt the backend on Amazon EKS with horizontal auto-scaling. Apache Kafka separates read and write pipelines, so a spike in one doesn't cascade into the other.	No user-facing failures during major traffic surges post-deployment.
App re-renders the entire screen on each update	Rebuilt frontend state management so only the changed account or symbol triggers a refresh. Heavy calculations moved from the browser into background workers.	Screen re-renders reduced by ~75%. Perceived lag dropped from ~400ms to under 30ms.
Slow payment confirmations for merchants	Built a real-time event pipeline that pushes payment confirmations directly to merchant dashboards via persistent connection — no polling or manual refreshing.	Merchant confirmation times improved by 30–35%. Confirmation-related support tickets dropped meaningfully.
Compliance rebuilt from scratch per product	Created a shared compliance layer covering data storage rules, audit trails, PCI DSS requirements, and KYC — reusable across every product on the platform.	New products now launch with compliance already wired in. No duplication required.

Results at a Glance

2,000ms → 250ms

Balance API response time

75% reduction

in screen re-renders during peak hours

400ms → 30ms

Event loop lag at peak load

30–35% hike

in payment collection speed for merchants

Zero

production incidents during the engagement

Eliminated

core banking read load, completely removed

Kotak Mahindra Bank’s Words On Our Work

"The diagnosis was accurate from day one — it wasn't one problem, it was five compounding. Every fix has held under real load." — Engineering Leadership

Digital Banking Infrastructure Modernisation

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