The Future of Finance: Deutsche Borse and BBVA Lead the Way with New Strategic Partnerships

Welcome to this months issue of our Capital Markets to Cloud blog. FIO had a number of conversations with financial institutions this month about their transition to cloud. A recurring trend for banks that are large enough is that they are building a layer on top of their cloud platform that makes it "safe" for internal dev teams to work with cloud. We'll have more on that next month.

For this issue, we highlight how the FIO team attended the Google FSI day in Singapore and our very own Amol Pai spoke at the ITOPS 3.0 event in Mumbai, co-sponsored by QualityKiosk and Elastic. Lastly, we end on some new strategic partnerships announced by Google and AWS in the capital markets space.

Google Cloud - Is CDP the new CRM?

Google has long been a leader in the digital advertising and marketing space, and their recent foray into the Customer Data Platform (CDP) market has been met with great anticipation. One of the key benefits of Google's CDP is its ability to facilitate hyperpersonalization of customer experiences. By leveraging data from a variety of sources, including website interactions, customer service interactions, and purchase history, the platform can create a detailed picture

of each customer's unique preferences and needs. This enables banks to deliver highly targeted and personalized marketing messages, offers, and promotions, which can greatly enhance customer engagement and satisfaction.

FIO is exploring different ways to leverage the potential of CDP for practical and relevant use cases for our clients. One such use case is enabling traders to access real-time data on transactions and preferences, which can help them make more informed trading decisions. Additionally, CDP can provide bank Relationship Managers with a unified view of customer interactions, which can enable them to provide personalized advice and support to customers, ultimately leading to stronger relationships and a higher NPS (Net promoter score).

BBVA Takes on Financial Markets with AWS Computing Power

BBVA has collaborated with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to bring the most sophisticated operations of the Corporate and Investment Banking area to the cloud. BBVA's new cloud platform provides greater computing power to carry out more complex calculations related to financial markets faster and more efficiently.

BBVA's equity trading team now has access to "BBVA C-fit", a platform built around AWS and Bloomberg technologies, to provide them with one of the most cutting-edge platforms available in the financial markets sector. The use of AWS's global infrastructure allows BBVA to accelerate processes, reduce costs, scale quickly, and increase flexibility, making it easier for BBVA to continue leveraging cloud capabilities to sustainably increase the efficiency of the service it provides to its corporate customers.

Deutchse Börse goes with GCP for digital assets

Deutsche Börse and Google Cloud have formed a strategic partnership for the next ten years, where Google Cloud will become Deutsche Börse Group's preferred cloud partner. Deutsche Börse will use Google Cloud’s secure infrastructure and analytics capabilities to accelerate the development of its digital securities platform D7 and a digital asset business platform.

The two companies will also jointly deploy a data mesh to enhance Deutsche Börse’s data distribution and data use cases in the cloud. The partnership aims to drive tangible success for Deutsche Börse and further enhance its cloud adoption and efficiency, and underscores the benefits of cloud technology, data analytics, and AI for market participants.

The Future of ITOps: Outpacing Uncertainties

The business landscape is rapidly changing, and technology is at the forefront of this transformation. Every company is now a technology-first company, and the complexities associated with it are increasing with each passing day. With high expectations from their investment in technology, there is a lot of anxiety about the performance of the deployed systems. The dependence on external systems, multiple cloud environments, regulatory compliance, cyber threats, and changing processes to adapt to customer demands and new business extensions are sufficient to keep CxOs awake at night. In this context, modernizing ITOps is essential, but the conversation should center around the practical aspects, challenges faced, interventions, and opportunities available to implement an effective modern ITOps.

Our CTO, Amol Pai had the opportunity to engage on the topics below during the ITOps event in Mumbai on February 16th. He has highlighted the key questions and points discussed during the event below.

Q: What is your biggest challenge that keeps you awake and thinking about how to control it?

A: Uptime. The digital face of any organization is the mobile app and the APIs exposed for others to use. However, multiple underlying systems contribute to the functionality of the mobile app/APIs. For example, in the case of a banking app, if a person logs in to check the balance, calls are made to a login authentication system, user role and rights system, core banking system to fetch account list, rule engine to know which accounts to show, the need for a 2nd factor authentication, and then the balances are fetched. All of these pass through another system, which is the Enterprise bus. In short, all these systems have to work smoothly and in sync to ensure that the mobile app/API is up and available. The focus is always on ensuring and planning that these moving parts are always in sync and available.

Q: What were the approaches applied to ensure the above?

A: The first approach is to bring all the teams together so that we know who is responsible for working on an issue. The second and most important approach is to have a uniform view of the problem. Different teams cannot be left to visualize or share their version of the issue. Dashboards were created, and ownerships were established between teams, i.e., if a particular dashboard flashes an issue, then everyone knows which team has to work on it. The third approach was to create a dictionary of error codes and procedures to resolve that issue. This dictionary is evolving since all the combinations of issues across multiple systems are not factored in at the time of go-live. While it is always desirable to have a single view of all the participating systems and underlying infrastructure, it is not always possible to have one. Hence it's best to adapt to what is available, fine-tune the processes, the systems, and the dashboards needed to monitor them.

Q: How did you measure the outcomes?

A: While we set multiple parameters to measure the system performance, such as infra utilization, error rate, response time, we distilled all of this to one value - the number of days since the last outage. This value was shown prominently on all dashboards and reports. This number was owned by all the ITOps team members, and they knew the part they had to play to prevent this value from resetting to zero.

In conclusion, modernizing ITOps is crucial in today's technology-first landscape. The key is to have a uniform view of the problem, establish ownership between teams, create a dictionary of error codes and procedures to resolve issues, and measure outcomes preferably through a single high level value. It's best to adapt to what is available, fine-tune the processes, systems, and dashboards to monitor them to ensure that the moving parts are always in sync and available. Thanks for reading this months issue of our C2C Blog. We hope you enjoyed it. Feel free to contact us to have a discussion on how capital markets are moving to the cloud.