Q: In short, what was the goal of this transformation?
TF: The transformation was the result of an internal business review, looking to see how we could roll out new products in a shorter timeframe and in turn deliver better customer service.
Historically we have managed and run our own servers and applications in house, both at headquarters and also at our disaster recovery sites, but there was a realisation that this consumed a lot of internal resource just to keep everything running. By leveraging cloud-based services and infrastructure, we can remove a lot of commoditised work from our tech team today, whilst also positioning the business well for the future.
Q: What does this mean to your customers?
TF: A change like this can appear on the face of it to be relatively minor, but this process has delivered two key benefits. By utilising cloud infrastructure and services our tech teams can focus more on innovation and reducing the time to market for new products. At the same time, the cloud technologies enable all new releases and changes to be done as a fully automated, end-to-end process. That means no downtime, improved testing and no impact to the client experience while maintaining a robust performance for our platform at all times.
So, whether the change process is triggered by customer feedback, an internal business decision or is even the result of a wider, market-facing issue, clients and the business alike get to see the improvements in a shorter timescale.
Q: Surely server developments happen all the time?
TF: Whilst this is nothing out of the ordinary, it’s important to note that this wasn’t what the industry sometimes terms as a lift and shift migration. Instead it saw the company building a series of new and re-platformed or refactored services. These have been designed in such a way as to take full advantage of the technical advances possible with a cloud native architecture.
In other words, the improvements here go far beyond just the soft side of the customer experience, but have also delivered an overhaul of the operational, security and compliance processes, along with the supporting infrastructure. Two vital aspects – security and compliance – now sit at the core of the automated process; meaning that every change is reviewed not just functionally but also against the rigorous security and compliance standards that we and our partners demand. By taking this truly proactive approach we can resolve any potential problems long before they could impact our production services.
And by doing all of this in partnership with a world leader in cloud computing services, it has delivered that goal of faster product innovation with more interactive customer feedback. It also means that CMC can now redeploy resource from managing commodity services and infrastructure to building new product offerings and innovations.
Q: We hear a lot about the cloud – is this the future of forex?
TF: The forex market today is dominated by the global network of datacentres for order matching and execution, but there’s certainly plenty of talk that the cloud has the scope to play a more significant role when it comes to price dissemination. Many in the industry are already looking at the benefits new counterparties could see in terms of lower setup costs, ease of integration and the ability to sidestep the requirements of global datacentres if the full potential of the cloud can be realised.
Ultimately, this migration underlines how the landscape in financial markets – and especially FX – is in a constant state of evolution. At CMC Markets, harnessing these opportunities as they arise has been very much at the heart of the business since it was first founded and over £100million has been invested in our technology to date.
I think it’s fair to say that the mantra remains that wherever innovation presents an opportunity, we’ll look to adapt and take advantage of that. The cloud-first strategy allows us to benefit from agility, scalability and speed of delivery – three vital components in the delivery of any tech-based service, especially those in financial markets.
