How Kotak Securities rebuilt for speed, scale, and full platform ownership

Challenges

Kotak Securities' platform was serving close to 500,000 visitors a day across product information, market education, and investor tools.

To keep up with the pace the business and audience required, the team needed to publish and update content at velocity and independently. The platform made that difficult.

The site ran across a legacy CMS and a static HTML layer managed through vendor FTP uploads. IPO pages took up to two weeks to go live. 

Regulatory emailers had to be hardcoded before they could go out. The stock widget wasn't indexable. 

No shared design system meant visual inconsistency had built up across years of updates. The on-premise infrastructure had no room to scale under the load it was already carrying.

Approach

Fixing everything at once on a platform this size wasn't an option. The portal served a large daily audience, and any disruption would be immediately visible.

The decision was to work section by section, resolving the constraints that were causing the most friction first. Each part was rebuilt and handed back to Kotak Securities' team before the next one began. 

Technical choices were made around what the team could own and extend over time, not just what would work for the build.

Information architecture, content structure, and component decisions were worked through together. The goal was a platform Kotak Securities controlled completely, not one that created a new dependency.

Solutions 

Progressive rebuild

The site was rebuilt section by section while staying live. Each release was stable and owned by Kotak Securities' internal team before the next phase began. With every section that went live, the dependency on external vendors for day-to-day platform operations reduced.

Design system

A shared design system gave both teams a single reference point for every build decision. It removed the inconsistency that had accumulated across years of vendor-driven updates and gave the internal team the ability to ship changes and publish content without raising a development request. Over 18 months it reduced frontend effort by over 40% and brought release cycles from days to hours.

Cloud infrastructure migration

The on-premise setup was replaced with a cloud infrastructure built for the traffic volumes the platform was already carrying. Autoscaling and regional failover removed the risk of performance degradation during high traffic periods. The platform now handles peak load without intervention.

Search-visible stock module

The third-party stock widget was replaced with a custom API module built around Kotak Securities' content schema. The old widget wasn't indexable and added no search value. The new one updates in near real time, ranks for high-volume stock keywords, and turned a feature that previously contributed nothing to search into a consistent source of organic acquisition.

IPO publishing workflow

IPO publishing required coordination across teams and external vendors, pushing release cycles to two weeks. A dedicated internal workflow cut that to days, removing the cross-team friction that held every release back. Content now ships ahead of market interest rather than after it.

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Search-optimised content and acquisition system

Investor-facing content was rebuilt using modular templates structured for indexing. Frontend handoffs reduced, publishing moved from days to hours, and layouts became reusable across IPOs, product campaigns, and tools. Pages like stock calculators and market explainers now perform better in search and capture demand when interest is highest.

Outcome 

Three years in, the platform is built on Strapi and Next.js, and the team runs it on their own.

Kotak Securities' team now controls the full publishing cycle without external vendors. IPO content that took two weeks to publish takes days. Platform changes that took days take hours. The stock module ranks for high-volume stock keywords and drives organic acquisition consistently.

Frontend effort is down by over 40%. The infrastructure handles over 500,000 daily visitors without latency or downtime, and the platform has maintained performance through peak traffic periods without intervention.

The same foundation now supports AI-assisted workflows and solutions for financial results publishing and multilingual content.

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