Learning from Angel One: The Guardian Angel of Investments

There is nothing artificial about web-oriented architecture when it is done right.

On the contrary, an effective internet-based computer program – which improves the existing user experience and communicates deep truths about a company – is as genuine a narrative as there is.

Introducing Angel One

Angel One is one of the largest Indian stockbrokers listed on the National Stock Exchange (NSE). Founded in 1987, it is a technology-led financial services company that provides broking and advisory services, margin funding, loans against shares, and distribution of financial products. With a network of over 16000+ registered authorized persons, Angel One offers broking and allied services through online and digital platforms.

Angel One has built a reputation for innovation and technology leadership in the Indian stockbroking industry. They have been at the forefront of introducing new products and services to their clients and are constantly looking to improve their technology infrastructure to offer the best experience to their users.

However, despite their success, Angel One faced a significant challenge with their legacy system. The system was outdated, slow, and unable to keep up with the requirements of modern applications in the stockbroking domain. They needed to move to a new system that could compete with new-age applications and provide a better experience to their users.

To address this challenge, Angel One associated with our team of experts to understand and develop a solution that met their needs.

Finding the Reason Beyond the Reason

In the highly competitive world of stockbroking, technology is key to success. With the rise of new-age applications and changing customer preferences, it is essential for companies to keep up with the latest trends and offer the best possible experience to their users. However, this can be a significant challenge, especially for companies with legacy systems that are slow, outdated, and unable to keep up with modern requirements.

Angel One, one of the largest Indian stockbrokers listed on the National Stock Exchange (NSE), faced just such a challenge. Their legacy system was struggling to keep up with the demands of modern applications in the stockbroking domain, and they needed to move to a new system that could compete with new-age applications and provide a better experience to their users. They also needed a team that could help them build robust, scalable, and fast microservices in Golang.

However, there were several challenges that they faced during the project:

• Regulation: Fintech companies in Latin America face a complex regulatory environment, with varying regulations in different countries. This makes it difficult for fintech startups to operate and scale their businesses.
• Legacy system integration: The legacy system used by Angel One was complex, and integrating it with the new Golang-based microservices was a challenge. The team needed to ensure that the integration was seamless and did not cause any disruption to the existing system.
• Scalability: Angel One needed to ensure that the new system could handle the increasing load of users and transactions. They needed to build a system that was scalable and could handle the load without any performance issues.

To address this challenge, our team had to build a new, Golang-based microservices architecture.

Embracing the Fundamental Challenges

Most financial institutions see the world through a ‘fresh lens’ - the way Angel One approaches - technology doesn’t need to be gently advanced but radically reinvented – because better user experience and scalable web application can help solve and serve long-term goals. Our experts embarked on a mission to modernize and rejuvenate Angel One’s existing legacy system, but it first had to address the following problems:

• Business Knowledge and Technical Expertise: As a technology-led financial services company, Angel One had complex business requirements that needed to be understood and incorporated into the new system. Our team had to combine their technical expertise with a deep understanding of Angel One's business to break down the complex solution into smaller and simpler microservices.

• Legacy System Complexities: Angel One's legacy system was over 20 years old and had functional complications that needed to be addressed. One of the biggest challenges was to change the entire logic written in SQL to Golang. This required a deep understanding of the underlying logic and a simplified approach to ensure that the new system could handle the complexities of the stockbroking domain.
• Time Constraints: It was necessary to reduce the time required to calculate the changes and close all the formalities related to the exchange. This meant that the solution had to be delivered within a tight timeframe without compromising on quality or functionality.

From Theory to Practice, and To Successful Solutions

Part of successful web-oriented architecture is to build an ownable new application around the challenges. To address the above challenges, our professionals designed a robust and scalable backend that could ingest trade files received from NSE and BSE and produce all trades on Kafka. By using Kafka to process the events in parallel and make them fault-tolerant, we were able to ensure that the system could handle large volumes of data without any downtime.

We also used Golang to consume Kafka events and calculate different types of charges incurred by users. Once the calculations were done, PySpark scripts were triggered to validate the charges calculated against the values provided by the exchange. This ensured that the system was accurate and reliable, which is critical in the stockbroking domain.

In addition, we integrated NSE and BSE APIs to provide trade-level information for a given user. This allowed Angel One to provide a better user experience and ensure that their clients had access to real-time information about their trades.

Capitalizing on the Innovation and Providing Valuable Solutions

Thanks to our solution, Angel One was able to achieve significant improvements in their system performance and efficiency. With millions of transactions per day, the system required robust, scalable, and lightning-fast microservices, and we were able to deliver just that using Golang.

One of the major improvements was the reduction in time taken to process charges and close all the formalities related to the exchange for over 3 lakh+ users. Previously, it took around 12 hours to complete these tasks, but with our solution, the time was reduced to just 2 hours. This represented a significant improvement in efficiency, enabling Angel One to deliver faster and more reliable service to their clients.

Another significant improvement was in the time taken to calculate over 10 million transactions. Previously, it would take up to 2 hours to calculate all the transactions. With our solution, this time was reduced to just 45 - 50 minutes. This improvement meant that Angel One was able to provide a faster and more efficient service to their clients while also freeing up time for their team to focus on other important tasks.

Overall, our solution provided Angel One with a modern and efficient system that could handle large volumes of data and millions of transactions per day. By leveraging Golang, PySpark, Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL, and Apache Nifi, we were able to deliver a solution that not only met but exceeded Angel One's expectations, enabling them to compete with new-age applications in the stockbroking domain.