Administration & Security Issues Solved for Investec’s Capital Markets Trading Infrastructure
Investec is a specialist bank and asset manager providing financial products and services, imbued with a personal approach, to a select client base in three principal markets: the UK and Europe, Southern Africa and Asia-Pacific. Investec was founded in South Africa in 1974, entered the UK in 1992, and has since expanded through a combination of substantial organic growth and strategic acquisitions.
Problems & Results
ICIB trading and treasury operations span FX trading, equity derivatives trading, equity derivatives sales and structuring, interest-rate trading, money market, and other financial products. Trade origination messaging traffic represents 133,000 daily transaction flows involving settlements, CRM, ECM (Enterprise Content Management), payments, and reconciliation applications, which rely upon a middleware messaging backbone in a distributed systems environment.
According to Jason Ho, ICIB Infrastructure Manager (South Africa), the ICIB Data Services team was enduring administration and audit challenges. Visibility into overall transaction flows across mission critical applications was missing, along with in-depth tools for operational monitoring and management capabilities for their middleware stack. In addition, a fool proof means of accessing message payloads and tracking wayward transactions was needed. From a compliance perspective, the lack of a comprehensive message audit capability to satisfy both internal and external auditors represented a pressing operational risk.
Key Results
To address Investec’s challenges and assure high availability and reliability of transactional functionality, which is the foundation of its capital markets trading and other processes, a fast implementation of a robust highly scalable solution was needed. The bank engaged Blue Turtle Technologies, a respected South African technology consulting firm with a vendor agnostic approach to solutions. After a survey of all available options, Nastel’s AutoPilot ® was selected to replace BMC and other well-known APM & ITSM vendors and freeware products. Nastel AutoPilot® delivered missing in-depth message tracking and application monitoring, covering middleware management and audit compliance capabilities, plus an integrated single-pane-of-glass view of all critical metrics and functions. Along with fault detection, problem resolution, and reporting tools, Nastel AutoPilot® with its built-in analytics also provided proactive round-the-clock alerts via SMS text and email.
International, Multi-Department Messaging Middleware
Following on the success of the Nastel AutoPilot® implementation in South Africa, Investec Bank plc UK has chosen Nastel AutoPilot® to monitor its middleware infrastructure across the Corporate & Institutional Banking (ICIB), Wealth & Investment and Asset Finance business units. Within ICIB UK Nastel AutoPilot® is used across IT functions covering Enterprise Service Bus, SWIFT and Meridian payments systems. This provides crucial oversight of the IT infrastructure and key applications (supporting trade and payments systems). These are high transaction value systems and in-depth visibility into applications, including IBM MQ and IBM Integration Bus estate, is crucial to supporting the business.
At Investec, high availability and reliability is absolutely critical because of the amount of money each transaction carries within our integrated trading environment. Nastel AutoPilot® plays an instrumental role ensuring these transactions are delivered on time, with any breaks in continuity caught and corrected instantly. With Nastel AutoPilot®, the middleware infrastructure supporting our trading operations runs securely, efficiently, effortlessly, and we meet the stringent data security requirements of internal and external auditors.
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IndustryFinTech
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Solutions
- AIOPs
- Integration Infrastructure Management
- Middleware Management
- Transaction Tracking
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