AWS Business Intelligence Blog

Axis Bank gets modern business intelligence capabilities with the help of Amazon QuickSight

This is a joint post authored by Sanjay Jain and Rahul Murarka from Freecharge (A subsidiary of Axis Bank).

With over 5350 branches, 8 international offices, and over 16,000 ATMs, Axis Bank is India’s third-largest private sector bank. In this post, we share how Axis Bank used Amazon QuickSight to achieve highly scalable modern business intelligence (BI).

As part of our digital transformation journey, we started using AWS to modernize our applications to be cloud-centered. We’ve deployed several mission-critical applications on AWS, from onboarding journeys for Savings, Salary, Staff Account, central Know Your Customer (KYC) platform for video KYC, eKYC, to credit card servicing application.

In 2021, we set up a Data Lab to provide data-driven solutions for digital products built by our Digital Business and Transformation (DBAT) team. We provide BI Dashboards, Business Reporting, Data Engineering, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Generative AI (GenAI) solutions that helps our organization build, refine, and market better digital products. We’re working to standardize analytics and data visualization for our AWS-deployed applications, and needed a modern BI tool for our banking and product performance analytics.

Our legacy BI tool was expensive to use, and would grow more so as we scaled. We also faced several limitations:

  • We encountered performance and usability challenges in handling and visualizing huge volumes of transactional data.
  • Dashboard data refresh was not stable as we encountered frequent failure due to unavailability of native connectors for Amazon DocumentDB.
  • For our Vision Platform (KYC, VKYC, Biometric, CKYC & Liveliness) dashboards, we could only process and consume the last 15 days of data, restricting visibility into granular data we needed to make day-to-day decisions
  • We had limited self-service capabilities for drilling down into data.

From approval to prototype—in under 2 months

Most of our data platform was already in AWS, so we decided to evaluate the QuickSight tool first. We also knew its consumption model would save us money and were excited about the possibility of using Amazon Q in QuickSight to expand our self-service capabilities with natural language processing (NLP) capabilities.

At the start of 2023, we began building a proof of concept to evaluate the performance of QuickSight for our use cases and scale.

In just 2 months, we developed a successful prototype of production pilot dashboards and started migrating our remaining legacy dashboards to QuickSight. We believe QuickSight—as a fully managed, serverless service—is the quickest-to-deploy BI and visualization tool on the market.

Deploying modern BI with QuickSight across our organization

QuickSight is primarily pulling data from Amazon Redshift, our data warehouse where data is consolidated from the application database. Right now, we manage access through AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) integration and QuickSight managed users, and organization-wide single sign-on (SSO) using our Azure Active Directory platform.

We quickly rolled out 70+ QuickSight dashboards for savings, salary, staff onboarding journeys to credit card servicing, gold loan etc. digital applications to 7 authors and over 200+ readers across 15 business teams.

The following diagram illustrates the solution architecture.

Use cases

This solution helped us address several different use cases.

Gold Loan product analytics

The Gold loan overview dashboard shown in the following screenshot gives our employees insight into the overall performance of the digital gold loan application & its adoption in the bank. It showcases disbursements by region, business, branch, and how they contribute toward overall growth of KPIs related to disbursement.

KYC analytics

KYC (Know your Customer) is a critical regulatory compliance function for banks – they have to assess the customer at risk and KYC requirements. We use QuickSight to monitor the KYC(Video KYC, eKYC) compliance process KPIs, as shown in the following screenshot.

Exponential performance benefits

QuickSight has allowed us to drastically scale up the volume of data our dashboards handle—while dramatically improving the end-user experience and decreasing IT staff interventions.

We saw several huge benefits:

  1. Technical benefits – We realized the following technical benefits:
    • We can ingest and process 70 million rows in QuickSight compared to 0.3 million rows in our legacy BI tool, translating to 233 times greater data scalability.
    • We saw a reduction in cycle time for information and dashboard availability to the users.
    • We saw a performance improvement visualizing transaction-level data.
    • We experience zero downtime because QuickSight is serverless and works smoothly.
    • We’re able to provide full-fledged data analytics under one roof because QuickSight can handle data since inception for all our products.
    • We have access through IAM integration, QuickSight managed users, and Azure Active Directory SSO.
    • We achieved easy-to-manage role-based access with SSO integration and implemented row-level security for data access-level restrictions.
  2. Speed – With an integrated design pipeline of Amazon Redshift and QuickSight, our time to make data available to the end-user is reduced from hours to minutes. The overall cycle time of our data requirement, reporting for digital products with Amazon Redshift and QuickSight has been reduced from 6 hours to a few minutes—and can scale to process larger volumes in shorter time frames than our legacy tool.
  3. Volume – We are now easily able to handle data for our digital applications with a heavy volume of over 70 million records compared to 300,000 rows on our legacy setup—233 times as much data. With tabular dashboards, we could only consume 15 days of data with our legacy product. With QuickSight, we are now able to empower users to access granular data with no latency and faster performance. We can analyze larger datasets, helping us understand and prioritize which features to add or enhance.
  4. End-user experience – QuickSight is a highly interactive, modern BI tool that offers superior drill-down and drill-through capabilities into billions of records. Users can now do deep dives on the data without any help from IT.
  5. Staff efficiency – An automated pipeline integrated with reports meant we could enable users to perform self-service audits of our digital application reports, improving their efficiency and eliminating IT dependency.
  6. Marketing and sales performance – We gained the ability to track end-to-end funnel journeys, and enhanced marketing ability to track leads and conversions by pairing more granular data with the prospects’ current activity.
  7. Cost savings – Migrating to QuickSight, which has a consumption-based usage model, has saved us 80% on fixed BI licensing and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) infrastructure costs across development, testing, and high-availability and disaster recovery environments.
  8. Operational Overhead – Operational Overhead is almost negligible due to managed platforms which help to stay up to date with matching compliance like server maintenance, patching, upgradation of platforms, license recalculations and updating license requirements. No upfront payments, pay as you go model are the key highlights of the platform

What’s next

Our initial QuickSight trial and deployment have been a huge success, so we’re scaling it across the organization for new use cases. We’re also exploring generative BI using Amazon Q in QuickSight to help end-users get more out of their dashboards. Finally, we’re identifying new avenues and use cases for embedding QuickSight into our internal applications to improve experience and adoption.

“We believe QuickSight deployment has one of the fastest time to market products, supported by its flexibility and agility of the platform. We were able to go live and migrate the first phase of dashboards in less than 2 months.”

– Sanjay Jain, Chief Technology and Product Officer

“QuickSight is a highly scalable, modern business intelligence tool designed to meet today’s data requirements. By significantly reducing the analytical processing time from weeks to just a few hours, it enhances the efficiency of data analysis and business decision-making for the DBAT team.”

– Rahul Murarka, Associate Director of Program Management and Data Lab

“AWS QuickSight is the ultimate tool for handling big data with its interactive dashboard, cost-effective pricing model, and seamless integration. Over the past year, we have successfully deployed numerous dashboards in QuickSight, and its user base continues to grow. We are constantly discovering new functionalities, such as the ability to collect input data from QuickSight and save it in the database.”

– Rahul Kotian, Associate Director – DevOps and Yuvraj Hole, Associate Director – DevOps

Get started with QuickSight

QuickSight is a modern enterprise BI tool that helps us explore a lot more of our data—faster. This means we can see more and make better decisions. It’s also saving us 80% in licensing and EC2 infrastructure costs. To learn more, see Amazon QuickSight.

About the Authors

 Sanjay Jain is the Chief Technology and Product Officer for Axis Bank’s Digital Business and Transformation function. He is a fintech expert and angel investor. He has a proven track record of building first to market products catering to Telecom Operators, OEMs, Silicon vendors, Insurance, Neo Banking, FinTech, Trading and Mutual Fund.

Rahul Murarka is the Associate Director of Program Management and Data Lab at Freecharge, a subsidiary of Axis Bank. He has extensive experience in consulting FMCG giants in market research and analytics, product and agile project management, data science. He’s built a variety of digital products in the martech, insuretech, and fintech space.

Aneek Arora is a QuickSight Specialist Solution Architect. He has spent more than 15 years in presales, solutions consulting, and business development in BI and analytics portfolios. He has been working in the business analytics domain across industry verticals to help customers define their overall analytics strategy. He has been a key speaker at many marketing and executive events. Aneek brings a great deal of passion and energy to sharing his knowledge with the community.

Avaanticka Narayan is a Analytics Specialist who spent over 17 years of experience in presales, solutions consulting, and business development within the realm of business intelligence and analytics. Throughout her career, she has diligently served various industry verticals, aiding clients in defining comprehensive analytics strategies. With a fervent dedication, Avaanticka eagerly imparts her expertise to the community, exuding passion and energy in her endeavors.