System-led performance with internal control for Kotak Securities

Challenges

KSL faced deep structural limitations. The public-facing site was split across two systems: a legacy CMS and a static HTML layer dependent on vendor-driven FTP uploads. Neither system was built for stability, performance, reuse, or SEO.

They were dealing with security vulnerabilities and lacked internal ownership of the platform.

Marketing agility was limited. Emailers used for regulatory communications had to be hardcoded by third parties. IPO-specific content, often time-sensitive and important for customer acquisition, took weeks to publish, making it difficult to respond quickly to market windows.

The absence of a unified design system, reliance on external vendors, and limited in-house development capacity made scale and speed difficult. The infrastructure was rigid, hard to scale, and out of sync with growing daily traffic.

To address this, we needed to think about how content, performance, and development could come together under one cohesive system, without disrupting day-to-day operations.

Approach

The approach was to stabilize the system and shift control to internal teams before introducing major changes. Technical choices aligned with what the team could manage and extend over time. 

Immediate blockers were resolved to maintain platform stability during periods of high user activity and transactional sensitivity. 

Each section was treated as a self-contained unit. Delivery was incremental and paced to match stakeholders’ decision-making.  This enabled continuous improvements without affecting other parts of the system.

Our focused work on information architecture, UX, and content workflows shaped how implementation progressed, influencing the structure of modular components, automation logic, and performance-focused delivery.

Solutions 

Progressive rebuild

From approach to execution, progressive build remained core to how the site was rebuilt section by section while remaining operational. This was necessary to avoid disruptions to investor activity across core journeys during peak market hours. It allowed internal teams to adopt the new system at a pace where they could learn, implement, and execute effectively. As a result, each rollout improved operational stability and site functionality without risking existing workflows and experience. 

Design system ops

Bringing in a design system early removed visual drift across product pages, investor tools, and learning content. It cut down dev time, made QA more predictable, and helped teams ship new features without resetting design logic each time. Over the past 18 months, the same system has supported content across teams, reducing frontend effort by over 40% and bringing average turnaround time for platform changes down from days to hours.

Search-visible stock module

The third-party stock widget was replaced with a custom API module built for control, speed, and visibility. The old widget wasn’t indexable and couldn’t be structured for search. The new module updates in near real time, aligns with our content schema, and ranks for high-volume stock keywords, turning a static embed into a traffic-driving performance asset. This shift made core stock data discoverable in search, converting an invisible feature into a new source of organic acquisition.

Cloud-native infra migration

KSL’s legacy on-prem infrastructure couldn’t keep up with traffic during trading hours. The move to the cloud improved uptime, removed deployment blocks, and scaled under load. With autoscaling and regional failover in place, the platform now handles over 500,000 daily users without latency, slowdowns, or downtime.

IPO delivery model overhaul

IPO content was a key acquisition driver, but release cycles were held back by manual workflows and cross-team friction. A dedicated IPO publishing workflow cut turnaround from two weeks to days. This shift lets teams capture time-sensitive traffic and compete for high-volume search terms. As a result, content now ships ahead of market interest, driving consistent spikes in organic traffic and user engagement.

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Search-optimized content system

Investor-facing content was rebuilt using modular templates and structured formats that could be indexed. This reduced frontend handoffs, sped up publishing from days to hours, and made layouts reusable across IPOs, product campaigns, and tools. As a result, key pages like stock calculators and market explainers now perform better in search and capture demand  when interest and volume are at their peak

Outcome 

Built on Strapi and Next.js, every page now follows a predictable format, reflecting a modular design and strong information architecture built for systematic operation and complete internal control.

With Kotak Securities, we created a platform tuned to respond to market volatility, listing timelines, and investor interest cycles. New stocks, IPOs, and financial instruments can now be added programmatically using structured templates and connected data sources. It was built for speed, visibility, and creative reuse. 

Content creation, publishing, and performance tracking now run through a single system created for uninterrupted search and scale. The platform supports real-time acquisition across 500,000+ daily users.

The transformation was incremental, permanent, modular, compliant, and shaped around the operational realities of the regulated investment and trading industry.

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