Fintech
The digital transformation of financial operations for the FinTech industry
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Enhancing financial services in a nutshell
We developed a comprehensive digital solution for our Client from the FinTech industry that is a leader in the Stock Exchange market. Our team provided backend support on the project during the development of the specific clearing system.
Background
Leveraging technology helps the financial industry to remove the barriers to conducting complex transactions. Getting familiarized with IT challenges faced by FinTech, we introduced digital innovation to one of the global clearing houses at the London Stock Exchange.
Solution
We helped our client realistically improve trading processes on the exchange market. Our IT system effectively enhanced traders' comfort in decision-making and radically reduced the time of executing transactions just to a few milliseconds. As a result, the company has vastly increased its revenue and the number of transactions, getting ahead of the competition.
Benefits
After receiving three prestigious rewards, i.a., for the biggest number of transactions and the greatest activity in the European Intraday electricity market, our client became the leader in the energy trading sector.
A few words about our Client
Our client is one of the leaders at Stock & Commodities Exchange. The company belongs to the leading Global Clearing House. They are focused on the diversified global financial markets infrastructure and data business. Is an open-access partner, that excels in delivering top-notch financial services. They have significant operations in 70 countries across EMEA, North America, Latin America, and Asia Pacific. They employ 25,000 people globally, more than half located in the Asia Pacific.
Our approach
Our team consisting of Java backend developers and testers always took care to share knowledge at cross-team meetings. Taking up a proactive attitude, the team detected areas that needed improvement and suggested lots of solutions.
We delivered a variety of improvements within the financial platform, carrying out enhancements and providing full support on a highly critical clearing system.
Summing up, the team was responsible for:
Improving the communication between services within the system using Kafka.
Analyzing, building, and delivering software components written in Java.
Advancement of clearing workflow.
Creating a library to facilitate the use of metrics.
Functionalities
How we met the expectations of the FinTech industry
We have contributed to supporting the clearing house by engaging in several projects which aimed to improve transactional flow and running financial operations.
A deeper understanding of the financial industry
Whenever the ownership of security is transferred from one individual or institution to another, whether it be the sale of new shares or existing shares sold on an exchange, there are key processes that each transaction must go through. Clearing is arguably the most complex financial process, dealing with the transference of money and securities.
Identifying the FinTech challenges
Our aim was to support the clearing house in lowering the risks of transactions between banks.That's why we improved our Client's operations based on Murex – the fundamental technology in the financial sector. The main challenges we needed to overcome referred to the system's integration and security.
Coming up with the key IT solutions
We have developed a deep understanding of the mechanics of clearing operations and applied this knowledge in practice. As a result, we supported our Client in creating a dedicated system of communication between services based on Kafka – the viable technology in logging architecture that enables microservices communication.
Improving Kafka-based notification service
One of our main responsibilities was developing an extensive notification system that fosters all financial operations of the parties involved in the transactions. We dealt with the notifications in a microservice architecture. Our task was to set out the functionality for sending notifications from the monolith (Murex) to the microservice (MVNS). The whole communication was based on a Client's industry-standard protocol for complex financial products – ClearLink. The main channels of notifications were based on IBM MQ messages in a special FpML format.
Making the financial system more secure
One of the problems we dealt with concerned web applications that were exposed to security vulnerabilities. The apps required switching from HTTP To HTTPS. So, we offered assistance in implementing TLS/HTTPS encryption for existing services. We have taken another step to improve the financial system’s security. The vulnerabilities we patched were discovered during the Client's internal PEN-tests (penetration tests). As part of our vulnerability patching work, we addressed TLS/HTTP implementation and XSS vulnerability fixing.
Tech stack
Both fintech and consultancy
We went beyond implementing the technology solutions and provided our Client with the consultancy related to: foreign exchange instruments (NDF, NDO, Option, Forward, Spot), risk management, and the options for enhancing clearing workflows. As a result, we managed to match the financial solutions to the needs of the clearing house.
plan
The prospects for the future
As our cooperation with the clearing house strives, we plan to continue rebuilding a monolithic system into microservices. In further steps, we will conduct our Client's system cloud migration to AWS in order to foster the company's scalability. Our aim is to support the Client in becoming a high-tech company operating smoothly in the financial sector.
