How Religare Broking re-engineered its trading platform for scale, speed, and AI

In capital markets, technology failures are not just operational inconveniences—they directly erode trust. For Religare Broking, repeated disruptions in customer-facing systems became a moment of reckoning, forcing the organization to confront a hard truth: its legacy technology stack was no longer fit for a market defined by real-time decisions, extreme volatility, and digitally native investors.

“The issues were visible to customers almost every day—especially on the mobile app,” says Siddharth Bhat, CTO, Religare Broking. “Stability and user experience had become business-critical problems. That’s when we realized this wasn’t a matter of fixing components; the architecture itself was fundamentally broken.”

When legacy becomes a liability

At the core of Religare’s challenge was an aging infrastructure layered with years of incremental application development. Over time, this had created an ecosystem that was large, fragmented, and increasingly fragile.

“We had two compounding issues,” Bhat explains. “First, an old infrastructure that failed frequently. Second, a sprawling set of legacy applications built on an outdated tech stack. Individually they were manageable, but together they made maintenance, scaling, and innovation extremely difficult.”

As trading volumes grew and user expectations shifted toward real-time, always-available digital experiences, the cracks widened. Customer-facing failures became the inflection point that triggered a full-stack, digital-first rebuild.

Rebuilding from the ground up—with cloud at the foundation

Religare’s transformation began with a strategic shift to the cloud—not as a lift-and-shift exercise, but as a catalyst for architectural simplification. The firm adopted a hybrid cloud model and migrated close to 80 percent of its workloads to AWS.

“Cloud gave us the elasticity and resilience we simply couldn’t achieve earlier,” Bhat says. “But more importantly, it gave us the opportunity to simplify.”

That simplification was deliberate and methodical. Legacy applications were retired one by one, overlapping capabilities were consolidated, and the technology stack was rationalized before performance optimizations were applied.

“You can’t optimize chaos,” Bhat notes. “Streamlining the landscape was essential before we could redesign the trading core for speed and reliability.”

Engineering for volatility, milliseconds, and market spikes

At the heart of the transformation was a complete redesign of Religare’s trading core—built to handle real-time order flows, unpredictable market surges, and millisecond-level decision systems.

“In trading, volatility doesn’t arrive politely—it hits all at once,” Bhat says. “Our systems needed to scale instantly, not after human intervention.”

AWS’s native auto-scaling became central to this design. Instead of provisioning infrastructure for peak loads, Religare’s systems now expand and contract dynamically based on real-time demand.

“When volumes spike during volatile market conditions, capacity scales automatically,” he explains. “We don’t need to over-invest in static infrastructure, yet we still maintain millisecond-level responsiveness. That balance is critical in broking.”

This elasticity ensured stability even during extreme trading days—when performance failures can translate directly into financial loss and reputational damage.

Why hybrid cloud remains non-negotiable

Despite the aggressive cloud push, Religare deliberately retained an on-premise footprint. The reason, Bhat says, is rooted in both regulation and physics.

“Our exchange connectivity is non-negotiable,” he explains. “Exchange links cannot currently be terminated directly at public cloud providers. That means our price feeds—the real-time market data that powers trading—must still be received and initially processed on-prem.”

Beyond regulatory and latency constraints, there was also a strategic cost consideration.

“Some non-critical workloads are simply cheaper to run on-prem,” Bhat says. “Not everything requires high-end cloud services. Maintaining a private environment on a pay-as-you-go model gives us flexibility and better total cost of ownership in specific areas.”

The result is a pragmatic hybrid architecture—one that combines cloud-scale resilience with performance-critical and cost-efficient on-prem systems.

AI that enhances judgment, not noise

While infrastructure modernization stabilized the platform, Religare’s next leap came from embedding AI and ML directly into its user experience—starting with research recommendations.

“Our research team produces a significant volume of insights every day,” Bhat says. “Ironically, that became a problem. Customers were overwhelmed by notifications and started ignoring them altogether.”

AI provided the filter. Machine learning models now analyze individual trading behavior, recent activity, and demographic data to determine what content is genuinely relevant for each user.

“We don’t send more information—we send better information,” Bhat explains. “Each customer receives research that aligns with their interests and trading patterns.”

The impact goes beyond engagement metrics. “It respects the customer’s attention and creates a feeling that the platform understands them,” he adds. “That’s a real shift in experience.”

Reliability as a discipline, not a feature

Serving over a million users means Religare must perform flawlessly when markets are most unpredictable. On peak days, order volumes can surge two to three times without warning.

Religare addresses this through a three-pronged reliability engineering approach.

“First, we rely heavily on deep internal expertise,” Bhat says. “Our SMEs perform rigorous functional testing, covering edge cases that automated tests often miss.”

Second is architectural elasticity. “Auto-scaling and containerization allow us to absorb 2x to 3x volume increases organically, without manual intervention.”

The third pillar is stress testing at extremes. “We regularly test at 5x expected volumes,” he notes. “That’s how we ensure new releases won’t buckle under pressure—and that no single component becomes a hidden bottleneck.”

From technology enabler to strategic differentiator

For Bhat, the long-term vision is clear: technology must move from supporting the business to shaping competitive advantage.

“Scale and speed are the cost of entry today,” he says. “Our focus is on building agility and intelligence into the core of the platform.”

Religare is investing in intelligent algorithmic trading and advanced machine learning models to deliver hyper-personalized insights—what Bhat describes as a “financial co-pilot” for customers.

Autonomy, however, is approached with caution. “Any autonomous execution must be explainable, auditable, and aligned with regulation,” he emphasizes. “Customer interest always comes first.”

Equally important is future-proofing. “We continuously evaluate how changes in compute, infrastructure, and data platforms will impact our stack,” Bhat says. “That’s how we stay ahead while keeping total cost of ownership under control.”

The broking platform of 2030

Looking ahead, Bhat envisions a radical shift in how investors interact with markets.

“The broking platform of 2030 will evolve into an intelligent, hyper-personalized financial ecosystem,” he says. “Agentic trading will allow AI agents to monitor markets and execute sophisticated strategies in real time, significantly reducing human bias.”

Advice will become contextual and individualized. “Customer-specific intelligence—based on behavior, risk appetite, and goals—will replace generalized recommendations.”

He also foresees deeper ecosystem integration. “Open APIs will enable a one-stop financial services experience, and broader adoption of blockchain in regulated environments could fundamentally change how services are delivered.”

For Religare Broking, the transformation is less about chasing trends and more about building enduring capability. By re-architecting its core, embedding intelligence, and engineering for volatility, the firm is positioning technology not just as infrastructure—but as the engine of trust, speed, and differentiation in India’s fast-evolving capital markets.