Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com Inc. company, announced that Edelweiss has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider, running the vast majority of its workloads on the world’s leading cloud to further drive its digital transformation efforts. To date, Edelweiss has migrated over 210 mission-critical applications from multiple business lines to AWS, including stock recommendations, public websites, and data models, to reduce cost, improve agility, and create innovative new services. Using the breadth and depth of AWS’s portfolio of cloud capabilities, including compute, machine learning, management and governance, serverless, and database, Edelweiss is building a digital ecosystem of applications and systems using application programming interfaces (APIs), which enable Edelweiss’s wealth, asset, credit, and insurance entities to securely exchange information and launch joint customer services. The digital ecosystem’s secure information exchange enables Edelweiss to gain greater customer insights, improve speed to market of new customer services, and help customers make better investment and financial decisions.
Each of Edelweiss’s multiple business groups previously ran their on-premises infrastructure in silos, which meant upgrading infrastructure and building new customer services was challenging and took engineers away from creating innovative new services for the company’s 1.45 million customers located across more than 100 cities in India and internationally. Running the on-premises infrastructure also meant high costs, consuming 80% of Edelweiss’s IT budget. As the company started transforming into an agile, data-driven enterprise by moving to AWS, it focused on dramatically reducing the costs associated with the undifferentiated heavy lifting of managing infrastructure. Edelweiss now spends 50% of its IT budget on driving digital innovation initiatives aimed at providing richer customer experiences at much lower costs, including a data mart which creates a unified view of the customer across Edelweiss’s business groups and an artificial intelligence (AI) stock simulation which provides predictions on stock performance to traders in real time.
With AWS, Edelweiss seamlessly scaled up its infrastructure for five days to process investments of more than US $2B during the launch of the Bharat Bond exchange Traded fund (ETF)—at 10% of the cost of a comparable on-premises system. By leveraging Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud, Edelweiss eliminated service downtime and minimized response times when customers invested into the ETF, making the Bharat Bond ETF India’s largest first-time bond ETF subscription offer launched by an asset management company. By centralizing and analyzing previously siloed customer data using AWS, Edelweiss can gain new customer insights and enable a more personalized customer experience. Using Amazon SageMaker, AWS’s service that helps data scientists and developers to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly, Edelweiss’s life insurance group has trained machine learning models to deliver personalized service and support to over 370,000 customers. For example, the models provide Edelweiss customer service agents with personalized insurance offerings which they can offer when engaging customers by phone or chat. Since adopting Amazon SageMaker, Edelweiss has reduced the time to launch new machine learning models from six months to only three weeks, and increased cross-sell rates by 300% and fraud detection rates by 35%.
“AWS is integral to Edelweiss’s strategy as we digitally transform from a traditional financial services organization to an agile, data driven enterprise,” said Nitin Agarwal, President and Group CIO, CTO, and Chief Digital Officer, Edelweiss. “We benefit from AWS technologies such as machine learning to create a digital ecosystem that connects our entities and enables them to co-deliver customer personalization at scale, all while maintaining the highest levels of regulatory compliance.”
“Edelweiss is using AWS to digitally connect its entities and radically change how they develop innovative services that help customers make better investment and financial decisions,” said Puneet Chandok, President, Commercial Business, India and South Asia, Amazon Internet Services Private Limited. “By selecting AWS as its preferred cloud provider, Edelweiss gains access to the broadest and deepest portfolio of cloud services to deliver new financial services faster and interact with customers and partners in a more seamless and secure way.”