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

Challenges

To keep up with the pace the business and its audience required, the team needed to publish and update content at velocity and independently.

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, and the stock widget wasn't indexable, so a high-intent feature returned nothing in search.

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

Approach

Fixing everything at once wasn't an option. The platform served a large daily audience, so the work went section by section, starting with the constraints that slowed the team most, and each part was handed back to the Kotak Securities team before the next began.

Underneath that was a clear view of the real problem. The team could use the platform, but they couldn't run it without outside help. So every technical choice was made around what the team could own and extend over time. The goal was a platform Kotak Securities controlled completely, not one that created a new dependency.

Solutions 

Reduced vendor dependency

As each section was rebuilt and handed over, the Kotak Securities team took ownership of day-to-day operations. Routine changes that once needed an external vendor moved in-house, so the team controls its own release cycle.

A shared design system

A shared design system gave both teams one source of truth for every build decision. The internal team can now ship changes and publish content without raising a development request, keeping the site consistent across every update.

Cloud infrastructure built for peak load

The on-premise setup was migrated to cloud infrastructure provisioned for the platform's real traffic, with autoscaling and regional failover. It holds performance through market-driven traffic spikes, when investor activity runs highest.

A search-visible market data module

A custom API module, built around Kotak Securities' content schema, replaced a third-party stock widget that wasn't indexable. It updates in near real time and ranks for high-volume stock and market keywords, turning a high-intent feature into a source of organic traffic.

A dedicated IPO publishing workflow

IPO content had depended on coordination across internal teams and external vendors, which stretched time-to-publish. A dedicated internal workflow removed that cross-team friction, so IPO pages can go live ahead of the subscription window.

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Modular, index-ready content templates

Investor-facing content moved onto modular templates structured for search indexing and reusable across IPOs, product launches, and investor tools. Pages like brokerage calculators and market explainers are built to capture demand at the moment intent is highest.

Outcome 

The platform carries over 500,000 visitors a day without latency or downtime, holding through peak market periods. 

IPO pages that took up to two weeks to publish now go live in days. 

Updates that took days now take hours. Frontend effort is down by over 40% across 18 months. 

A feature that returned nothing in search now ranks for high-volume stock keywords and brings in organic traffic the site never captured before. 

The team now runs the entire publishing cycle on Strapi and Next.js, with no external vendor in the loop. The same foundation now supports AI-assisted workflows for financial results publishing and multilingual content.