The architecture of IT solutions used in the implementation of a given financial service is one of the key factors determining its success. Architecture serves as a foundation, which is why it requires particularly high competence—both in terms of knowledge and experience—to create. New solutions and technologies are appearing on the market all the time. Most of them will soon be obsolete. Only a few of them will make a more lasting presence in the market.

It is clear that no service offered commercially to customers should be based on technologies and solutions that prove to be short-lived. The cost of replacing the architecture, including both direct (financial) and indirect (like reputational) costs, might be so high that it makes you question the viability of the entire service.

We have been working for the financial industry for three decades and we know that nobody likes to endlessly replace technology and rebuild architecture. A modern enterprise in the financial industry should focus on the business objectives of its services and not on the myriad IT technologies – that often contradict each other.

When designing the architecture of an IT solution, we identify the technologies required to develop a business service based on knowledge, practical experience and – let’s be honest – intuition. That’s right – business before technology.

Problems in the broad field of security are becoming more apparent every year. A top-tier financial product, particularly one of such caliber must ensure flawless security across at least three fundamental areas:
● Protection against data or system leakage
● Protection against breaches of data and system integrity
● Protection against system unavailability

In reality, there are many more areas related to these problems: the DORA regulations, as well as the relevant iSO regulations or finally OWASP addresses some of these problems to varying degrees.

It is also important to remember that the security of a modern system is not only about the data but also about the system itself, including the algorithms and intellectual property “contained” within it. Taking this into account, the system should be created according to appropriate standards and should be operated in an equally secure manner. Even the most secure software will be insanely dangerous in an unsecure cloud or runtime environment. And vice versa: a secure cloud will not fix the problems caused by poorly written software.

Modern IT systems usually demand high scalability, availability, and robust disaster recovery capabilities. All this is compounded by the issue of Business Continuity – a key requirement in many cases. To make matters worse, contemporary IT systems are heterogeneous and characterised by a multitude of technologies being used. As a result, a typical service provided to customers by companies in the financial industry runs on an extremely complex runtime environment.

This environment can consist of physical machines (which are becoming increasingly rare), virtual machines, containers as well as SaaS and FaaS solutions. As if this were not enough, the runtime environment never exists on its own solely as a production environment – there are also test environments, pre-production environments, and so on.

One can get lost in this maze of technologies. Also, regulatory requirements – including security and continuity of business can be challenging.

The financial industry – like no other industry – navigates a veritable thicket of regulatory requirements. As IT has become a vital foundation of financial services – many of these regulations involve IT. This, in turn, means that it is impossible to fulfil the regulatory requirements without an in-depth knowledge of the technology. 

Unfortunately, in a typical case, this is acts as a barrier to growth for a bank or any other financial institution: instead of growing the business, the company’s efforts are focused on mapping regulatory requirements onto complex technological aspects.

Our aim is to take this kind of problem off our clients’ shoulders. We want our clients to be able to focus on developing their business while we competently deal with compliance issues. 

We are able to perform a full-scale audit and carry out all work – including design and documentation work – and concretely indicate the best methods of achieving compliance with practically all regulations at the interface of IT, law and financial services. In particular, we have extensive knowledge and practice of the GDRP, but also of DORA – both in the context of the EU market and the Swiss market.

In today’s fast-moving world, financial services and especially payment services, are its lifeblood. Increasing globalisation, coupled with the growing demands of end users, means that instant payments – which did not really exist 30 years ago – are now a serious part of the market. Moreover, the number of executed transactions is growing intensively. With them come increasing demands on scalability, performance and, above all, on the security of systems.

On the other hand, market developments are giving rise to new solutions (for example SEPA Instant) and existing ones (SEPA, SWIFT, Visa/Mastercard payment systems, contactless payments). This includes the emergence of new billing solutions, new reconciliation methods, etc.

Payment systems, especially the so-called Payment Hubs, have always been the central axis around which we have built our competences. Due to the huge number of sources and recipients of transactions, the complexity of the systems, and the performance requirements, this area of the market has always been of particular interest to us.

In today’s financial services, what we once called “efficiency” has greatly expanded its definition. Nowadays, the focus of every modern enterprise is not only on ensuring adequate processing speed but also on ensuring scalability of services, availability, and maximum continuity of business. This often translates into MTBF, MTTR.

Complex IT solutions may generate various risks affecting these parameters, as so-called ‘failures’ can encompass a wide range of scenarios: from security breaches and hardware failures to software errors, and an infinite range of human errors. There are also more subtle 'failures’ related to the effectiveness of the financial service, which translate into reputational risks.

We have powerful, battle-tested experience in optimising financial services and the IT systems that support them at virtually every level. This includes the typical (and virtually always necessary) optimisation of application performance, spanning from the execution of development and application management processes to the performance of runtime environments.

Implementing innovation is always associated with risk. It is impossible to develop a company intensively without a certain level of uncertainty. But what is obvious, it is worth minimising it.

On the other hand, the majority of financial enterprises have stable and mature IT solutions – practically free of any particular risks, but at the same time without the possibility of creating innovative services and developing the enterprise more dynamically.

But does it always have to be the case that growth requires risky (yet innovative) IT solutions? We think not. We believe that in the financial industry, the end customer pays for the innovation and reliability of the financial service, not for innovative but risky IT technology. Unless it provides him with real benefits radically beyond the risks he observes.

An important challenge in such situations is correctly creating or locating the IT system where the business logic of the new services should be implemented. The choice of this location is of colossal importance, as it has a key impact on the risks associated with IT system development.

For many years we have been involved in implementing highly specialised and business-intensive financial services for the most demanding customers. We see our role as removing or minimising IT risk so that our client can focus on the business development of the service.

The merger of companies naturally raises a host of issues relating to the merging or cooperating entities. We have been involved in this type of operation for over 30 years, providing our clients with knowledge and concrete solutions.

Typically, two strategies are adopted in such cases: either the IT systems of the merged companies continue to operate independently, or a single system is selected to serve both entities. Of course, there are also hybrid solutions, especially since such decisions are made not in the context of a single system, but rather in relation to dozens (sometimes hundreds) of different IT solutions.

Regardless of the strategy chosen, it is crucial to accurately inventory the systems within the merging companies. This encompasses the functional aspects, often tied to customer service methods, and the IT infrastructure itself. It is necessary to inventory the software in terms of technology used, interfaces in use, databases involved, architecture, as well as security, high availability (HA) solutions, disaster recovery (DR) measures, and the maintenance processes including upgrades, etc.

We have been addressing this type of problem for years. A thorough knowledge-based inventory assesses IT systems and provides a clear indication of the superiority of one system over another in specific areas of comparison.

Based on this assessment, a scenario can be chosen: maintaining both systems with integrated functionality, or selecting one system over another (with variations possible, as discussed below).