The fintech and stock broking industry is undergoing a transformative shift, driven by cutting-edge technologies like cloud computing and AI. Ventura Securities is at the forefront of this evolution, leveraging innovation to enhance trading experiences, scale operations seamlessly, and empower investors with advanced tools. Arpan Sen, CTO of Ventura Securities, shares insights on the company’s approach to responsible growth, key technological advancements, and upcoming innovations set to redefine wealth management and trading.
How has the last year been for fintechs and stock broking platforms in terms of overall growth?
It has been robust. However, with an increased user base comes increased responsibility for ensuring reliability, with added compliance and security requirements, which we at Ventura are deeply mindful of. We are growing, responsibly.
In a nutshell, how do you see the impact of advanced technologies on online trading or stock broking platforms? Do you think the digitisation of such platforms has democratised investing in India?
The impact of cloud technologies is undeniable, and at Ventura, our new trading platform is completely cloud-native (to the extent permitted by regulatory guidelines). We are already seeing the benefits of price performance, the ability to scale on demand, and the ability to respond to security threats in real-time. The other big innovation of our times is AI and we are not even beginning to scratch the surface of what’s possible. Very early days, very exciting times.
Can you walk us through some innovations by Ventura Securities in the area of wealth management?
Uniquified view of holdings and ability to invest in multiple asset classes – from equities to F&O to mutual funds to fixed deposits – all in the same platform. There’s something for every kind of investor, and the ability to utilise market opportunities better: GTT orders, advance/decline ratios, viewing multiple indices in the same screen, market movers, etc., all help you understand the much-needed macro picture of what’s really happening
How are you leveraging the potential of cloud technology and driving growth through cloud migration?
Cloud has helped us scale our systems on demand – based on the trading volume our systems can dynamically add the infrastructure required to process the most demanding volumes. We have the benefit of having built our new app completely on cloud, so that has actually freed us from the shackles of any legacy systems – otherwise maintaining both a legacy infra as we as a cloud infra, and then migrating from legacy to cloud while keeping the systems humming is like changing a tyre in a moving car. Clouds also got us access to the right kind of hardware we need to support our workloads – this would have been a very slow process if we were depending on in-house infra.
After cloud, AI is the next transformative technology, how is Ventura Securities deploying AI models? How has been the impact of AI deployments?
Not yet. LLMs hallucinate, often by a lot. Finance is an area where hallucination outcomes are very serious – our users depend on us for concrete information, not half or any other version of the truth. Developers are taking advantage of Copilot, Perplexity, and similar tools – we are seeing productivity gains of up to 20-30% at times. Please do note though that your exact leverage will depend on how proficient you already are – because you have to guide these tools to generate what you actually want. Also, the finer aspects like concurrency, throughput etc have to be done at the developer end – but all things said and done, the productivity increase is definitely there to be seen. There’s a definite use case for using AI agents to improve internal support quality, and that is something we are looking at.
What are your strategies or plans for 2025? Are we awaiting any new launches?
Multiple new product features like commodities, sophisticated alerting, third-party API integrations, support for algo trading, etc. Ability to view your entire finances in a single place with our portfolio analytics module. Increasingly the app will help you benefit from market gyrations – notifications for tax loss harvesting, etc.