Driving digital transformation through the power of in-house platforms
By Meg Viado, Engineering Director in Commodities and Global Markets Technology
Introduction
As an Engineering Director in Macquarie’s Commodities and Global Markets Post Trade Technology team, a key part of my role is overseeing a core engineering function specialising in automation of post-trade operational processes.
I work closely with our market operations team and other Technology groups to realise our digital transformation ambitions. This involves identifying opportunities where manual intervention can be removed from the trade lifecycle for our end clients.
There can be several touchpoints for the end customer throughout the trading process. Our vision is to achieve zero-touch provisioning to streamline the trading process for our clients, enhancing their experience and allowing us to focus on engineering innovation in more areas.
Through close collaboration with our market operations and Technology teams, we’ve made significant strides in automating post-trade processes. A standout achievement is our in-house, event-driven microservice solution, which has drastically reduced manual touchpoints, from several hours to mere seconds in some instances. This solution, ideated in 2018, is now a cornerstone of our operational efficiency, widely used across our market operations team.
It’s always exciting as an engineer when you are able to achieve the most cost-effective outcome by utilising the tools already at your disposal, and that’s exactly what happened when we created this solution.
Where we started
Our journey began with the realisation that our pre-COVID-19 pandemic manual processes were no longer tenable for scaling our digital transformation ambitions.
We needed to move away from typical platforms where work is expected to happen in a discrete, sequential order and designed to only share data when needed. Often these disruptions are triggered by added information being made available, requiring the business to rapidly harness the value of data before the opportunity evaporates.
We began to ask ourselves — how might we use the continuous flow of data to drive automation of processes, insights and decisions?
Where we landed
Fast-forward to today, and we have fundamentally transformed major aspects of our payment and settlements function, driving operational efficiencies and reshaping how we serve our customers.
Using our event-driven platform, we have built smart processes that can automatically adjust workflow states when the most updated information becomes available from various systems and teams. This means reconciliations and adjustments can be made in real-time without sacrificing operational controls and running the risk of missing cut-offs.
We developed an in-house framework, enabling us to shift from big monolithic vendor platforms to event-driven microservices that interoperate using a common language.
By using event-driven microservices, each service can independently evolve, consume, process, and produce information without the need to understand where the data comes from or where it needs to go. Implementing an ‘event backbone’ has controlled the transformation and orchestration of non-sequential chains of data, to achieve coordinated responses from relevant systems in real-time. The event backbone also provides insights from the stream of data passing through the platform.
We also introduced reusable technical services to enable scale and agility. Application teams need to only subscribe to these common services to allow for specific functionality in their applications, affording them more time and resources to focus on building features for the business.
How we got there
Within our robust data governance framework, we needed to create systems that freely share data. This approach ensures the continuous and proactive delivery of information to the right areas of the enterprise. Liberating data in this way leads to a continuous flow of information that connects the enterprise from within and beyond.
We partnered with the Digital and Operations teams in the early stages to test and learn on small-scale projects. In order to roll it out further, however, we needed to demonstrate the value this technology uplift would deliver for our business.
In the most unexpected way, it was the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 that was the accelerator to roll-out the platform more broadly.
Three months later, we were able to automate the SWIFT processes, and we could run global support operation from a single location, rather than multiple hubs around the world. This allowed us to successfully address the challenge of keeping the SWIFT rooms across the globe operational 24x7, without staff in the office, which generated more interest and investment into further developing these capabilities.
Outcomes and what’s next
We have now leveraged our platform across several use cases. As the platform has expanded, we have been able to maintain agility by federating out the development of domain-aligned capabilities back to the application teams, enabling a central engineering team to manage the core and common services. We have also established an engineering product council to govern how the platform evolves in line with the needs and priorities of the business and technology stakeholders, and have stood up an engineering guild to maintain a strong community behind our platform.
We have created efficiencies so our technology teams can focus on building business capabilities within this portal. Through establishing a layer of event-driven data and process APIs, the Operations team is able to move to straight-through automation and exception management processes.
By overlaying micro-frontends on this layer, we have built a unified portal that allows Operations to view and manage exceptions in a single place across all stages of the trade lifecycle.
Where manual intervention is still required, we are presenting all exceptions via a consolidated exceptions queue so that users can easily identify where their attention is needed, and quickly take necessary actions.
What started as simple experiment by a small team has evolved to become the strategic platform for straight-through processing in our market operations function today. It has positioned us with the appropriate tools to drive our digital transformation strategy further, and deliver more seamless experiences for our customers.
As we continue to evolve and refine our post-trade technology landscape, the possibilities are endless.
