As digital transformation accelerates, organizations face mounting pressure to adapt swiftly to market changes while maintaining operational resilience. Composability has emerged as a critical strategy, with 84% of CxOs planning increased digital investments to address these challenges.
This white paper explores how composability—a design philosophy centered on modular, reusable components—enables enterprises to achieve both business agility and technical flexibility.
The Dual Pillars of Composability
Composability operates through two interconnected dimensions: business composability, which focuses on organizational adaptability, and technical composability, which enables modular business and system architectures.
At its core, composability replaces rigid, monolithic structures with autonomous building blocks that can be dynamically reconfigured. Think of it like LEGO bricks,each piece functions independently yet fits together perfectly to create something greater, whether in business or technology.
Business Composability: Aligning Strategy with Modularity
Business composability empowers organizations to pivot rapidly by recombining operational capabilities. By aligning modular processes and systems with strategic objectives, enterprises like banks prioritize composability initiatives that directly support critical outcomes such as growth, faster delivery cycles, and operational efficiency for launching new and personalized customer experiences, while also improving internal processes. A key driver for composability is overcoming the inefficiencies of traditional business models.
Challenges in Traditional Business Models
• Rigid structures that slow down innovation
• High costs of maintaining monolithic systems
• Inability to adapt quickly to changing market demands
Gartner’s 2024 survey reveals that 67% of CIOs are increasing investments in integration technologies and APIs—foundational elements for composable architectures. These investments enable cross-functional “fusion teams” to reuse existing capabilities, minimizing redundant solutions and accelerating time-to-market.
Technical Composability: Architecting for Flexibility
Technical composability relies on four core principles:
Modularity – Decomposing business processes into interchangeable components.
Autonomy – Enabling business units to operate independently while maintaining coherence.
Orchestration – Ensuring seamless integration and interaction between components.
Discovery – Encouraging continuous learning and adaptability.
Microapps and APIs serve as the linchpin, allowing systems to communicate seamlessly while maintaining modular integrity. Advanced implementations treat applications as products, managed through lifecycle metrics and user-centric design. Such practices ensure technical components remain aligned with evolving business needs.
Implementing a Composable Strategy
CIOs play a pivotal role in driving composability by:
Building cross-functional buy-in through business-centric messaging.
Prioritizing high-impact opportunities.
Establishing discoverability mechanisms.
Adopting product management practices to sustain reuse.
Vahana Cloud: Enabling Composability
Vahana Cloud, developed by Decimal Technologies, simplifies composability by breaking down applications into modular components, creating micro-apps, and integrating them into seamless digital journeys. With Vahana Cloud, enterprises can build and adapt applications dynamically, ensuring flexibility, scalability, and efficiency in their digital infrastructure. The platform provides a structured framework where components can be designed, integrated, and orchestrated effortlessly, reducing development time and enhancing business agility.
Vahana Cloud: Conceptual Architecture
With Vahana Cloud, enterprises can build and adapt applications dynamically, ensuring flexibility, scalability, and efficiency in their digital infrastructure. The platform provides a structured framework where components can be designed, integrated, and orchestrated effortlessly, reducing development time and enhancing business agility.
The bottom-most layer of this architecture represents the tech composability layer where we can do drag and drop, build things on the fly, and configure, or orchestrate things on the fly.
This is the foundation of Vahana Cloud which empowers enterprises to build, deploy, and adapt applications dynamically.
The platform consists of designer elements, integration toolkits, workflow builders, rules and decisions, DevOps, IT Ops, and AI Toolkit.
Above this, there is an entire layer of enabling a banking ecosystem, which is my master data definition, what is a channel, how my organization looks like, and all. Now from this layer, we transition from technical to business composability in Vahana Cloud, where you can create individual elements that are packaged business components. For example, KYC is a business-centric component.
A single KYC module suffices across multiple banking services, such as accounts, deposits, and loans, ensuringconsistency and efficiency. Similarly, consent management is centralized—if a customer’s consent applies to multiple loan types for a year, it is stored once and referenced across processes, eliminating redundancy. This composability framework enables the rapid assembly of prebuilt microservices and micro applications into diverse customer journeys. For example, in an account opening process, individual KYC and consent modules are seamlessly
integrated. Meanwhile, the risk and compliance team can access and utilize the same components, ensuring cross-functional alignment. This is how the top layer of our architecture is mapped to the micro applications concept of business composability. By uniting these four layers, Vahana Cloud enables the creation of a digital bank or convert a digital bank into a very flexible
bank.
Key Benefits of Vahana Cloud:
Case Study: AU Small Finance Bank’s Composable Digital Transformation
Solution:
India’s largest regional bank partnered with Decimal Technologies to digitally transform the Mobile Banking journey on the Vahana platform. The solution included the following key components:
End-to-End Digital Onboarding:
A fully digital onboarding journey for CASA (Current Account and Savings Account) customers, ensuring compliance with Central Bank guidelines such as E-KYC, Aadhaar (centralized national ID validation) IRIS, face authentication, and biometric verification
Customer-Centric Approach:
The revamped journey prioritized customer stickiness by introducing AI-recommended cross-selling opportunities and product variants based on the customer’s profile.
Composability:
The solution focused on business composability that allows for the reuse of business components across consumer journeys. Modules such asKYC, communication managers, consent management modules, and payment modules are created once and reused as Lego blocks across various journeys, enabling flexibility and reliability.
Vahana platform’s flexible architecture enables business composability by
delivering the necessary microservices and micro front ends.
Scalable Backend Operations (DOPS): The new DOPS design addressed the limitations of the existing system by offering:
AI Orchestration: Strong structured and unstructured data extraction, processing, and highlighting of discrepancies through the Vahana platform unstructured data processing capabilities.
Fraud Detection:
• AI-enabled identification of fraudulent documents, tampering, and highlighting of anomalies to push suspicious documents through additional manual checks.
• Integration with relevant AML and fraud databases to identify individuals and entities to be flagged for further investigation.
Flexible and Customized Workflow: Leverage the Vahana platform admin module to manage organization structure, product configurations, user and access management, case management, and requisite exceptions and deviations.
Scalable Architecture: Horizontally scalable architecture to cater to the load volumes during surges
Configurable Tech Stack: Enabled faster and cost-effective changes, converting weeks to days and days to hours.
Improved Stability and Observability: Brought in zero downtime and entire trace and auditability of every single operation to comply with central bank regulations.
Compliance Reporting: Quicker and more efficient generation of compliance reportstailored to central banking needs, resulting in tremendous time and effort saved on responding to central bank queries.
Conclusion:
The digital transformation of mobile banking journey marks a significant milestone for the bank to make it a leader in customer acquisition for savings and current accounts. Adoption of
composability and hyper automation using AI & No Code with customers at the center has been the key to success.
