As digital disruption transforms global banking, Financial Software and Systems (FSS) is determined to play the long game—reshaping not just technology stacks, but the very DNA of financial institutions. Vaidyanathan Venkataraman, Head – Global Digital Delivery, FSS, who brings over 35 years of deep BFSI expertise to the table in an exclusive interview with CiOL, talks about the company’s play in the BFS space: “At FSS, our mission is to lead financial institutions from outdated inefficiency to future-ready fintech—where speed and compliance work hand in hand.”
With its flagship Blaze Studio platform, FSS is empowering banks and fintechs to rapidly design, deploy, and scale digital solutions—bridging the legacy gap, embedding AI, and making innovation a sustainable, everyday advantage. As FSS sets its sights on becoming the trusted technology backbone for banks, Venkataraman shares how the organisation is not just keeping up, but wants to change the mindset in the digital banking race.
Let’s begin with a broader industry context. What’s fundamentally broken or inefficient in how financial institutions currently build and deploy digital applications?
Many financial institutions continue to rely on legacy systems that are 20 to 25 years old, which were never designed for the current real-time, data-intensive, AI-driven landscape. These antiquated architectures are inflexible, compartmentalized, and sluggish. Core payment processes such as UPI, cards, and gateways operate independently, hindering the ability to achieve a comprehensive 360° view of customers or to prevent fraud across various channels. As we remain in the early phases of AI adoption, it is presently regarded as an external enhancement, integrated through APIs rather than being woven into the fundamental workflows of the product, including authentication, authorization, and dispute resolution. This constrains its effectiveness and relegates fraud detection to retrospective analysis, instead of a proactive safeguard. Consequently, this leads to a system characterized by limited agility, postponed launches, and elevated operational expenses.
To address this issue, we have implemented Blaze Studio, which empowers product and technology teams to transition from concept to deployment within weeks rather than months. It facilitates quicker prototyping, versioned rollouts, and real-time testing within a compliant, enterprise-grade framework. Most crucially, it allows banks, financial institutions, and fintechs to incorporate AI directly into their workflows, enabling real-time fraud prevention, intelligent risk scoring, and automated processes. Blaze Studio provides banks, financial institutions, and fintechs with agility while maintaining reliability. It is not merely a tool; it serves as a conduit from outdated inefficiency to innovative fintech solutions.
Low-code is a growing trend across industries. What differentiates Blaze Studio from other platforms when it comes to meeting the specific needs of regulated financial environments?
Low-code platforms are increasingly popular across various industries as they enable teams to develop and launch applications more swiftly with fewer resources. This is particularly crucial in the fintech sector. Financial institutions today must quickly introduce new products, keep pace with evolving regulations, and address customer demands in real time. Conventional development approaches are frequently too slow and heavily reliant on IT—manual interfaces resulting in bottlenecks that hinder innovation.
In the banking industry, this transition is especially vital. Institutions are required to rapidly deploy digital products, adjust workflows to comply with changing mandates, and react to market fluctuations almost instantaneously, all while managing operational risks and upholding enterprise-grade standards.
Nevertheless, not all low-code platforms are designed for the intricate and highly regulated banking environment. Blaze Studio empowers banks and fintech companies to create and launch digital products significantly faster than traditional approaches. Utilizing user-friendly visual tools, it allows teams to design, test, and deploy applications swiftly without the need for extensive coding or complex channel integrations. Product managers and domain specialists can directly define business logic, minimizing the need for extensive communication with developers. Furthermore, Blaze Studio guarantees that all developed solutions are secure, scalable, and compliant with regulatory requirements. Its integrated testing, version control, and sandbox capabilities facilitate experimentation and enhancement of products or service offerings within the ever-evolving banking and regulatory landscape.
Blaze Studio is built around a domain-driven design philosophy. Could you unpack how that translates into tangible benefits for financial product and development teams?
Domain-Driven Design, commonly referred to as DDD, focuses on creating software that accurately reflects the operational realities of the business. In many financial institutions, there exists a disconnect between product teams and technology teams, leading to delays, rework, and confusion. DDD addresses this issue by involving domain experts, such as product managers and operations leaders, directly in the application design process. These experts are responsible for defining essential components such as entities, rules, and workflows. Consequently, the software is developed in alignment with this framework, rather than the reverse.
At Blaze Studio, we have integrated DDD into the core of our platform. The process begins with a thorough understanding of the business domain. Utilizing our visual tools, teams can articulate their business logic, and Blaze automatically creates the necessary backend microservices and front-end interfaces. This approach ensures that the application is constructed with a comprehensive grasp of the business’s operational dynamics, making it simpler to scale, audit, or modify as circumstances change. For financial product and development teams, the advantages are immediate. Transitioning from concept to prototype can occur within days, eliminating miscommunication between teams. Compliance is streamlined due to the clean and traceable structure.
Additionally, technical overflow is minimized as the architecture is modular and designed for longevity. Whether you are a bank updating outdated systems or a fintech company releasing new features on a weekly basis, Blaze Studio enables you to accelerate your processes without sacrificing control.
How are AI capabilities integrated within Blaze Studio today, and how do you see them evolving to enable predictive or autonomous development workflows in the future?
Many financial institutions continue to utilize AI in standalone applications such as fraud detection or analytics, rather than incorporating it into a comprehensive bank-tech journey. At FSS, Blaze Studio integrates AI thoroughly within the development and execution layers, in line with our vision of an AI-driven fintech platform. Presently, Blaze Studio automates logic construction and code generation, but it is progressing towards becoming an intelligent co-creator that enhances speed, minimizes errors, and guarantees consistency among banking teams. In the near future, Blaze will utilize large language models to evaluate user stories and automatically generate domain components such as subdomains, entities, and aggregates, adhering to Domain-Driven Design principles. Its visual logic builder will provide AI-enhanced code completions, reusable blocks, and real-time suggestions, while data modeling will benefit from optimized schema recommendations.
The intelligent integration of external microservices will facilitate the automatic detection of APIs and dependency mapping, thereby reducing manual effort. An AI chatbot will support developers with documentation, code snippets, and troubleshooting. Ultimately, Blaze Studio aspires to achieve predictive and autonomous workflows, improving delivery speed, design quality, compliance, and adaptability within regulated banking environments.
How have FSS’s internal teams used Blaze Studio in real deployments? Any specific use cases that highlight the platform’s ability to accelerate product delivery or enhance compliance?
Several internal initiatives are already leveraging Blaze Studio:
UI Generation for Internal Projects: Multiple internal teams are actively using Blaze Studio to visually design and generate the user interfaces required for their applications.
Payment Gateway Enhancement: The Payment Gateway team utilized Blaze Studio to define an updated Domain-Driven Design (DDD) structure, generate the necessary microservices, and implement custom business logic as part of their performance enhancement initiative.
DU Implementation: The DU implementation project is set to adopt Blaze Studio for both front-end development and microservice generation, streamlining the application delivery process.
FSS has played a foundational role in India’s digital payments infrastructure, right from its early work with Tandem systems and ATM switching to today’s AI-led innovation. Can you walk us through this evolution? What key inflection points shaped both FSS’s journey and the broader transformation of India’s financial ecosystem?
At FSS, we are divided into two large business models – one is on the licensing side and the other is on the processing side. Interestingly, if you look at our history, we started off 33 years ago as a services company. We used to service banks, and it was then that we realised that product is more important. That is how we got into debit card management systems, and later payment gateways. At the same time, we were the first ones to get ATMs in PSU banks.
Our story continued with this mix of services and products until about 2022, which is when we realised we needed to have a more pragmatic approach towards the changing market. We were seeing that the IT stack at banks was not helping them grow as fast as they would want to, and that’s where we brought in FSS BLAZE, our payments technology platform. This is a low-code, no-code platform that has got a tremendous response so far in India and the Middle East. We are now making the platform far more intelligent. We are adding an AI layer to the platform, which is going to be a game changer.
