Business stress testing for Global tier 1 investment bank

The need for a strategic solution

• This Global tier 1 investment bank wanted to develop a cloud-based solution to perform stress test calculations required by the UK regulator
• Previous reliance on the proprietary SAS Data Management platform and other tooling to undertake this analysis proved expensive, rigid and forced unwanted upgrade cycles
• Such constraints manifest themselves in significant ongoing costs and inefficiencies
• Develop a new application built from the ground up using only native cloud technologies utilising Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Aligning technology with the business

• Business process and technology alignment to utilise the benefits of cloud
• GCP gave access to the full suite of available technologies to build an efficient, scalable architecture
• Cloud storage used as a staging area for all data entering the solution; cloud functions used to trigger a more meaningful notification of data arrival; Kubernetes engine used to run python code orchestration; big query for data processing to match or exceed SLAs
• Cloud Key Management Service utilised to secure data in the cloud; Cloud Datalab components monitor and manage the extract-transform-load (ETL) workflows and Data Studio for reporting/visualisation

Compliance solution delivers sustainable benefits

• A future-proof system that supports growth, efficiency and scale
• A solution that is cost-effective, highly available, and to support  user demand at any time
• An efficient infrastructure that offers an agile approach and demonstrates how all bank systems perform under various stressed scenarios
• The project has delivered a significant reduction in development time and can be adapted to future requirements