GFT announces High Performance Computing in the cloud capability

25 June 2020 – LONDON / NEW YORK: GFT, a global IT services and software engineering provider driving the digital transformation of the world’s leading companies in financial services, insurance and manufacturing industries announces the availability of an expert High Performance Computing capability and a new GFT point of view paper (POV) discussing the adoption of HPC in financial services. HPC is cloud agnostic and has cross-industry appeal. It is particularly relevant across the financial services arena, supporting key areas such as front office trade pricing, profit and loss calculations, model back-testing, financial risk modelling, regulatory compliance, financial fraud detection, customer engagement, credit risk assessment and cyber security.

• Cross-industry appeal, particularly relevant for financial services firms

• Proven to enhance operational efficiency and improve regulatory compliance capabilities

• Proven to transform batch, real-time risk management and catastrophe modelling

• Proven to reduce a firm’s carbon footprint and the associated operating costs

HPC is the discipline of aggregating computing power to deliver much higher performance and throughput. This enables users to get significantly more out of a desktop, workstation or server-based environment, in order to solve the large-scale computing problems common across many industries. Unleashing HPC into the cloud is a game changer for most firms, enabling them to dynamically scale capacity up and down as required, and only pay for that which is really required at any given moment in time. This eliminates the need for expensive and inflexible on-premise servers and data storage. This not only has a positive impact on a firm’s carbon footprint, it also helps to significantly reduce the associated operating costs.

The new GFT point of view (POV) ‘HPC in the cloud: accelerating adoption to supercharge your business’ includes some very interesting findings from a recent independent survey on HPC adoption in financial services. The POV also showcases GFT’s recent experience of helping a major financial institution to exploit its transformative capabilities across a range of mission-critical business areas. In this particular case, GFT’s HPC and cloud DevOps experts, led by Maarten D’Haese, GFT’s HPC expert SME, successfully delivered a deployable reference architecture for TIBCO DataSynapse GridServer on Google Cloud Platform. Alongside much improved operational efficiency, the deployment of HPC into the cloud is proving to be an enabler for the seamless implementation of FRTB¹, a highly complex and processing-intensive regulatory requirement.

The capital markets arena provides a perfect use case for an HPC deployment into cloud. Typically, on-premise grids are sized to be just big enough to handle fluctuating overnight risk calculation batch runs. This means that there is often excess capacity during a normal trading day, but there might not be enough during highly volatile trading sessions which can seriously impact business performance. Running HPC fully or partially in the cloud enables capital markets firms to ensure there is always appropriate capacity available intraday and overnight, even during periods of high market volatility.

Soheil Negahbani, GFT Head of Engineering in North America and newly appointed spokesperson for the HPC initiative commented, “HPC is a growth sector with an estimated total market value projected to be in the region of US$36-38 billion by 2023**. In terms of actual HPC adoption on the cloud, it’s still relatively early days but interest is rapidly gaining pace, not only within financial services but also across a number of other industry sectors.

This announcement is a further demonstration of GFT’s unrelenting commitment to being at the forefront of technological advancement and using these new developments to drive positive change for our clients. I believe the unique combination of our proven, hard-to-find HPC expertise, underpinned by standout cloud technology engineering experience, provides a very compelling and highly differentiated GFT proposition.

This is particularly relevant for firms seeking to accelerate their business transformation programmes, in order to achieve significant competitive advantage, and ultimately better serve their respective customers. We are looking forward to playing an even greater part in helping them to implement the much-needed change adopting HPC in the cloud is proven to deliver.”

GFT Point of View paper (POV) showcasing recent client experience available for download here

¹ FRTB - Fundamental Review of the Trading Book

The Fundamental Review of the Trading Book (FRTB) is a comprehensive suite of capital rules developed by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) as part of Basel III, intended to be applied to banks' wholesale trading activities.

 **Source HPC Advisory Council, Intersect360 Research.

As of 2019, global market size for HPC was estimated to be $38.6 billion and was expected to grow by 30% to reach $50.2 billion in 2023. Currently financial services accounts for some 13% of the market and was expected to continue growing. However, because of COVID-19, estimates for the same period have been scaled back to be in the region of some US$36-38 billion.