THE CLOUD: GROUND RULES
Above and beyond When the pandemic prompted a huge uplift in demand for digital trading services, Saxo Bank responded by cranking up the Cloud migration that was already underway. Group CIO, Ashok Kalyanswamy, gives an insight into the journey
IT teams within established financial institutions (FIs) often find themselves managing the tensions between sunk costs in legacy hardware and improved functionality offered by the latest shiny new thing as they strive to ensure the tech stack runs smoothly. The outcome of that conflict makes itself felt across the organisation. Business units – and, ultimately, the FI’s users – rely ffnews.com
increasingly on super-fast databases to help process decisions and information flows. A capable and up-to-date tech stack isn’t just the IT teams’ concern, then: it affects how other departments can expand the portfolio of products and solutions they make available. But what if the build cost of such a system is so great, and the speed of progress so fast, that it’s outdated before the organisation can see a return on investment? How can existing institutions offer the quality that customers expect without spending millions overhauling their infrastructure? The online trading and investment specialist Saxo Bank decided that the way to avoid facing both those issues was by beginning a journey to the Cloud in 2018. “Cloud enables scale, volume, processing, and computer power,” says Ashok Kalyanswamy, group CIO at Saxo Bank. “It’s like being in a shopping mall – suddenly, there’s a whole bunch of services you don’t have to build yourself; they’re available in
the Cloud, as software-as-a-service, which you can use to augment and drive information and decision-making.” Two years after Saxo Bank announced that it was moving its entire tech stack to Microsoft Azure to speed up its digital transition, the events of 2020 prompted a record number of investor clients to join the bank, which is best known for its award-winning SaxoTraderGO platform, a complex and feature-rich application offering a unified web, mobile and desktop trading front-end. It became very clear that on-demand scalability was non-negotiable and validated Saxo’s decision to begin the transition to the Cloud back in 2018. It’s significant that, under those pressures, it became the first (and so far only) bank to achieve the highest Security, Trust & Assurance Registry (STAR) grade available from the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) for its management protocols and procedures. So, what has this progressive new approach to its tech stack allowed Saxo Bank to achieve? Issue 22 | TheFintechMagazine
21
