Broking Firm Angel One’s Superapp To Craft New Client Experiences: CTO Raiturkar

Hoping to broaden its client base, online trading and stock broking firm Angel One Limited is close to deploying a SuperApp that enables “better discovery, information architecture and personalised investment journeys”, says its CTO Jyotiswarup Raiturkar.

The tech innovation, he explained in an interview with PTI, ranges from crafting dynamic native experiences on mobile devices to creating customer cohorts and assigning journeys.

The digital-first approach of the company, which was earlier known as Angel Broking Limited,  has helped it stay ahead of the curve, meet expectations of tech-savvy young investors, and position itself as a new-age fintech platform that delivers innovative solutions seamlessly -- at a mobile tap.

According to Raiturkar, the power of AWS (Amazon Web Services) cloud computing, combined with Angel One's own tech-DNA, has led the fintech platform to strengthen real-time portfolio insights, reduce go to market, lower costs by 18 per cent and drive operational improvements to serve its customers’ financial needs.

Excerpts from an exclusive interview:

The pandemic compressed the digital transformation journeys of many enterprises. What were the key strategic pillars on which you built your digital strategy over the last two years at Angel?

The key strategic pillars of Angel One’s digital journey comprise an increased focus on clients, personalisation, prioritising technology, focus on engineering and a people-first approach. The first pillar in our strategy is clients, which translates into understanding their behaviour and solving their problems. It starts with defining what to monitor or from where to receive data signals. It goes on to setting up the analytical plumbing lines from discovery to post-trade funnels, building a data science talent pool, and setting up a data experimentation platform to build/deploy and derive models.

In April 2019, the company pivoted to build personalised solutions for its diverse customer base. Here, we began a self-serve app-based model for clients to experience personalised finance journeys. Our approach has also transformed into tech-first. It brought significant changes and is reflected well in our leadership. We have also transformed how we perceive a problem. It is defined clearly, taken live and managed with the speed and agility of engineering.

It has also changed how we prioritise things - tech debt, ruggedisation, along with new features. Lastly, building a people-first culture where every voice is heard and policies enable a work life balance and solving great problems. Angel One is a GPTW (Great Place To Work) top 100 company and a remote-first workplace.

There has been a surge in retail participation in the Indian equity markets. How have you managed to cope with the rising needs of your customers when it comes to speed and accuracy of data, execution of trades, use of data analytics and artificial intelligence/machine learning in helping them make smarter decisions etc?

Retail participation in the Indian equity market has surged dramatically, recently. We have taken a few strategic decisions to meet customer expectations. For instance, focus on the ruggedisation of key services. It includes things from ensuring servers are in high availability to rewriting some services afresh. Since the systems are extremely complicated, one needs a lot of attention to detail and imagination to craft tests which ease out failure paths and then solve them.

Another factor is democratising insights. There is a lot of data in terms of portfolio insights, real-time market insights, trades and charges, which has not been easily accessible to clients. But at Angel, we provide access to multiple years of data and advisories for our clients. One example is (recommendation engine) ARQ Prime, which has given around 26 per cent compound annual growth rate to clients over the last five years.

To bring more clients on board, we are in the process of deploying our new SuperApp version that enables better discovery, information architecture and personalised investment journeys.

Clients get access to relevant and timely content, including risk guardrails, to ensure they can avail of products without undertaking risks they are unaware of. The tech innovation here ranges from crafting dynamic native experiences on mobile devices to creating customer cohorts and assigning journeys.

With the technology landscape evolving so rapidly, how do you manage to stay ahead of the curve? What are the must-have qualities of a successful CTO today?

I believe in conceptualising a vision and architecture for the product, the team takes forward. It is driven by the aim to simplify and modernise systems. The must-have qualities in any leader are the ability to communicate the vision to engineers unambiguously, allowing for creative freedom in coding.

At the same time, it is important to be curious, and have a basic interest and internal drive to understand new emerging trends. Other than that, the ability to deep dive helps unpeel a system to understand details that might not initially be obvious. And finally, a leader must know how to prioritise and have the ability to anticipate problems and opportunities in advance.

What did cloud technology enable you to do that you couldn’t do before?

We run our core trading services on-premises and nearly everything else on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This includes advisory services, data and machine learning platforms, customer engagement and KYC (know your customer).

Running on AWS has several benefits. Angel One has reduced time to market as we can make updates live in minutes, which otherwise used to take days. We leverage AWS Managed Services like Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Redshift and Amazon OpenSearch Service, allowing our engineers to focus on solving business problems rather than infrastructure ones.

We are also effectively using resources with right-scale deployment fleets, which has brought about an 18 per cent cost reduction. For applicable scenarios, we can auto-scale as per load, and for many other scales, we can automatically pre-scale in anticipation of traffic patterns during that time.

There is also improved availability. We leverage multiple availability zones to ensure that systems are always-on. We will be one of the first AWS customers to build a multi-DC active-active solution for increased business continuity. With AWS, we can also leverage out-of-box deep insights, monitoring and alerting.

Using AWS has also resulted in business operations improvements. We can build seamless workflows using services like AWS Step Functions, which automates and simplifies our business operations. Additionally, managing infrastructure as code, setting up/tearing down fleets, getting metrics, and scaling resources have become accessible and amenable to automation.