Microsoft Azure powers Shriram Finance's super app that serves 20 million users across India

Shriram Finance has built a cloud-native financial super app on Microsoft Azure—and 63% of its users come from small towns and rural India.Called Shriram One, the app consolidates lending, deposits, insurance, and payments into a single interface. Since launching, it has crossed 20 million downloads, with fixed deposit volumes growing more than three-fold—from Rs 80 crore to nearly Rs 300 crore—in just two years.The partnership with Microsoft goes beyond cloud hosting. Security and compliance are handled through Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Microsoft Sentinel, while AI and machine learning models embedded in the platform have helped lift deposit balances by nearly 30%.For Shriram's tech team, the choice wasn't complicated. "We were already predominantly in a Microsoft environment, so Azure was a practical fit for how we needed to scale," says Gayadhar Behera, Chief Technology Officer at Shriram Finance.The infrastructure allows Shriram to manage workloads across multiple financial products in near real time—updating features and monitoring risk without disrupting customer experience. The app supports seven Indian languages, a decision that has been central to adoption beyond metro cities.The real-world impact shows up in the users themselves. Shivjot Singh, a long-haul truck driver from Punjab, got a Rs 5 lakh commercial vehicle loan approved within a week—entirely through the app, without stepping into a branch."Every day off the road is lost income," he says.As India's financial inclusion story shifts from account access to actual engagement, Microsoft's infrastructure sits at the centre of that transition—quietly keeping the plumbing running for millions of first-time digital borrowers.