Application Engineering: eTrading platform re-engineered for increased market share and major cost reductions
Success story
Modernisation
Upgrading legacy systems to ‘digital first’
Automation
Fully automated DevOps development process
Recognised success
Award-winning results
Challenge
Migration from legacy to modern technologies to reach ambitious business targets
- GFT’s client is one of the world’s largest financial institutions, present in over 70 countries
- The platform delivers $2.5Bn annual revenues, with 1,000s of customers and 10,000s trades per day
- The bank chose to invest in modernising this platform to support ambitious revenue targets and to regain market share
- The bank was facing fierce competition for market share from innovative technology focused firms as well as their traditional peers
- At a group level the bank had an objective to cut costs by delivering efficiencies through technology
Engagement
Operations simplified and streamlined through modernisation of digital platform
- The bank’s legacy systems had become a “code monolith”. This meant that changes took a long time, and the platform was difficult to support and maintain
- The legacy technology stack was modernised iteratively, by abstracting functions away from the monolithic codebase to a full blown microservices architecture
- Decommissioned several costly and cumbersome legacy systems
- User-centric approach to design of the new front end, rebuilt from a legacy technology (Flex) to modern technologies (Angular & React)
- Full automation of the test, build and release process using DevOps tooling
Benefit
Implementation of award-winning platform to increase client’s competitiveness
- As a result of this investment the client gained market share and became the leading platform for corporate customers
- Realised a 40% reduction in annual costs by introducing automation throughout the technology development and support process - achieved at the same time as the re-engineering effort
- Increased agility to compete with ‘born-in-the-cloud’ competitors
- Time-to-market shortened from many months to just days - from problematic, quarterly “big bang” production releases to many production deployments per typical day
- Improved platform stability by 68%
- Platform went on to win national and global awards within the eTrading sector
