Innovate and Elevate: Pioneering the Future of Financial Services

Modernizing and Scaling a Core Banking System

Netlight is partnering with the broker-dealer bank and its vendors to enable rapid business growth by scaling and modernizing the core banking system.

Rapid business growth is putting pressure on the existing IT landscape and systems. Especially around the core banking system capacity and throughput are reaching their limits. The technical architecture of the system is such that many of the textbook scaling approaches, such as horizontal scaling, cannot easily be leveraged. Creative and pragmatic solutions must be found, making best use of modern practices and technology while balancing effort vs impact.

Based on existing performance and scalability data and Netlight's own analysis, critical performance bottlenecks in the core banking system are identified and, together with feasibility and complexity considerations, selected for rearchitecting and optimization. Next to the tactical measures to remediate pressing throughput concerns, Netlight is working with stakeholders, architects and developers on a long-term modernization plan that involves breaking up the system into components, enabling full horizontal scalability and leveraging state-of-the-art technology and practices.

Enabling Hyper-Growth Within German Neo-Broker

The client is a leading german online broker that provides commission-free trading on various financial products and is known for its competitive pricing. They offer a user-friendly platform with educational resources and tools to help users make informed investment decisions.

The client faced challenges with exponentially increasing number of users and a higher request for new Market Data (Financial Instruments) providers. These included developing a sustainable engineering culture, scaling up their existing high volume data funnelling services while keeping the costs at a minimum, as well as integrating new providers for cryptocurrencies and stocks. The client lacked the engineering power and expertise to tackle the challenge.

Netlight collaborated with the client to develop a new architecture that is both maintainable and scalable. We worked closely with the engineers developing their funnelling services while leveraging state-of-the-art cloud services such as Kinesis, Redis and Flink. We also helped migrate their existing Market Data provider’s connection from Java to Kotlin whilst ensuring maintainability, modularity and availability. Once the migration was completed, Netlight helped integrate new Market Data providers using a variety of technologies such as Websockets, Rsockets, FIX protocols.

Integrated 3 new Market Data providers for cryptocurrencies and financial instruments.​ The new design enables a plug and consume model which only requires configuration, speeding up future onboarding of new providers​ The architecture allows the ingestion of ~70,000 Market Data points/sec ensuring resilience and scalability while decreasing the number of consuming instances in the downstream services.​

Improve quality in software releases and compliance in the cloud

The client is a Swiss data and technology-driven financial services provider.

They have integrated multiple partners to ensure compliance with Swiss banking law. With the fast-growing tech requirements of a fully digital bank, the client faced challenges of scaling their development on the cloud. It was necessary to support enhancing their quality gating and release strategy to increase the development velocity, as they also built their own tech organisation in Lisbon. Additionally, the client was forced to devise disaster recovery plans to ensure the prolongation of their banking license.

Netlight analysed the organisational structures and set up a talent attraction and retention plan while implementing processes to integrate Lisbon's remote developers into Zurich's systems. Since the remote working confronted the client with compliance issues, we proposed a CI/CD solution that decouples developer feedback from deployment to stay compliant with Swiss law and offers fast release cycles despite the remote setup. Since we found considerable technical debt in the cloud infrastructure setup, we proposed restructuring existing resources to ensure a future-proof setup and started implementing a disaster recovery plan. Our expertise in setting up and migrating towards Google Cloud has received great appreciation from the client, as we could generate qualitative results early in the project.

We helped implement a tech culture enabling the client to build its tech organisation. Building on our Google Cloud Engineering expertise, we designed and implemented a disaster recovery plan allowing the client to stay compliant with the Swiss banking license. Our implemented state-of-the-art DevOps approaches lead to increased velocity and quality assurance.