When the pricing structure of almost every broker is the same, turning to technology to create that differentiating factor makes sense. Leading players in the market are advancing and upgrading both their frontend and backend operations with technologies like E-KYC, order management, biometric authentication, advanced charting etc.Brokers are investing heavily on technology to not only create innovative services for their customers but also keep 100 percent uptime with no failures. With a similar objective, Upstox, an online trading space, is investing big time in cloud.
The brokerage industry saw a huge uptick in terms of their online customer base both nationally and internationally. Similar happened with Upstox. The company grew 4x in comparison to 2019. With a current total customer base of 2.6 million, the company eyes 6 million by year end.
In conversation with ETCIO, Shrinivas Viswanath, Co-Founder & CTO, Upstox shared how the company is powering its million users with technology.
“We are trying to be a digital broker first. The first time something is available, we try to become the first broker to get it done and get it live. If something is based on paper and needs to be digitised we have always been engaging with the exchange to see how we can digitise those things so that we don’t have to deal with paper back and forth. So those investments back in 2018 and 2019 really paid for us. So 2020 was more about scaling the digital we had,” Viswanath shared.
“Investing in cloud computing has been a big help. If you have to scale your systems generally without cloud you have to think a quarter in advance in general. But in covid, you did not had the luxury to install more capacity for you. And the worst yet best part was that the demand shot up like crazy. But being on the cloud saved us. The beauty of cloud is that it is literally like a rubber band. You can stretch it when there is high demand and then you can compress it back later on and save your costs,” he added.
He believes that cloud movement is 80 percent planning and 20 percent execution.
“Any large project, be it moving from legacy to new-gen technology or migrating from on-prem to cloud, the bigger part is the planning that goes in where you have to look at where all can we go wrong and then how do we mitigate the same issues. And if you miss that part then the execution becomes an agonizing exercise that just takes forever,” he added.
Learning from Social Media
You get a lot of data being a digital company and then comes the data from social media. When you have a bad experience at a restaurant, the first thing many people do is go and write a review. Similarly, when people have a bad experience of a product or some service, they complain or criticize a company on social media. But that is also the place where people will appreciate and praise you if you did well.
“So we have beefed up our product marketing team there to focus more on the internet space like Twitter, Facebook and everywhere else. The objective was to see what kind of feedback we are getting and then work through that. There we noticed a lot of people were sharing their view and analysis on social media. So we introduced a feature of chart sharing on our application. On your mobile phone, you can open a chart, do your analysis on it, draw your indications and annotations and share them on social media,” he explained.
“We track hashtags tied to our company names and use a few other tools to check these posts. This was not done with the objective of increasing revenues but it was rather a qualitative idea. So it is more a matter of convenience and driving customer experience,” he concluded
