HDFC Bank: Connecting Legacy and Innovation with PayZapp

21 March 2024

Winner of the 2024 Celent Model Bank Award for Payments Innovation

Abstract

In a payments market dominated by a few large players, it would be excusable to sound a defeatist note and focus elsewhere. However, HDFC Bank was not prepared to sit back and watch its customers leave for competitors. Instead, it successfully took them head-on by launching PayZapp, a bank version of an innovative payments superapp built on a modern, cloud-native stack. It aims to provide customers with a seamless and intuitive user experience while ensuring enhanced security features. According to HDFC, the user experience is market-leading and is the only such offering by a bank in the Indian market.

To help navigate the technical complexity, the bank partnered with Zeta, a provider of a cloud-native next-gen banking technology platform called Tachyon. While the new architecture leveraged several HDFC legacy systems, the bank and Zeta both had to develop many new systems and components. The partnership helped the bank develop a successful operating model for agile product launches and demonstrated how new cloud-based SaaS banking solutions can integrate effectively with legacy on-premises systems.