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Month: June 2022

A Global Bank Leverages Innovations in Technology to Scale their Supply Chain Finance Business ​

Posted on by kristapsasnins

Case Study

A Global Bank Leverages Innovations in Technology to Scale their Supply Chain Finance Business​

The solution promotes faster deployments and reduces new client implementation and onboarding costs.​​​

Overview

The client is a new venture arm of the global bank that provides a platform and catalyst to promote innovation, invests in disruptive financial technology, and explores alternative business models. ​

Challenge

The client wanted to launch a Supply Chain Finance product addressing the B2B segment in emerging markets. The current MVP needed to be scaled to support multi-region deployments with minimal regional-specific customizations. The client needed a partner who could help scale the business capabilities for the platform, allowing region-specific criteria. They also needed help to architect the platform to integrate with regional-specific ecosystems.​

Solution

Ness established an SCF business capabilities model based on the client’s target vision, followed by the technical and implementation architecture that accounted for region-specific rules and deployment requirements. Ness started with a set of countries that required minimal changes and simplified the onboarding of the bank’s partners, including Master Anchors, Anchors, Dealers, and FI, to the platform. The new model improved scalability, enhanced resilience, provided better data security and compliance, and enabled continuous delivery.​

Result

Our solution increased product quality, saved costs of onboarding new regions, enhanced customer satisfaction by improving time to market, and enabled control checks to validate the onboarding process. With a 65% reduction in the implementation costs and a 75% reduction in the onboarding costs for Master Anchors, Anchors, and Dealers, it promoted faster deployments (for Kenya, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Ghana). ​

A Top 20 Global Bank Implements an Order Management System to Deliver Greater Throughput, Resiliency, and Fault Tolerance​

Posted on by kristapsasnins

Case Study

A Top 20 Global Bank Implements an Order Management System to Deliver Greater Throughput, Resiliency, and Fault Tolerance​​

Ness re-architected the order management system onto a streaming architecture using Kafka to meet business needs.

Overview

The client is the wealth management division of a top 20 global bank, providing investment advice to help preserve and grow wealth and customize their strategy with each client using a combination of equities, options, and mutual funds. ​

Challenge

The client’s proprietary trade order management system needed a technology refresh to deliver greater throughput, resiliency, and fault tolerance. It was also expected that the new system would allow the recovery of messages in the event of a failure.​

Solution

Ness brought expert knowledge of trading systems, deep expertise in Kafka and streaming architecture, and an iterative approach to software development that yielded shorter release cycles to reduce project risk while delivering consistent milestones. The new microservices architecture was based on a data processing platform with Kafka at its core. An initial Proof of Concept (POC) allowed the client to assess the new system’s effectiveness for handling equities orders. Ness incorporated the client’s input on the performance and reliability of the re-architected application and expanded the system to manage the client’s complete line of products.​

Result

The new platform processes a minimum of 250 orders per second. The system can now scale linearly and provide real-time replication across multiple data centers. It allows recovery of messages from a specific point in time (in case of unavailability of external systems), supports message sequence guarantees for all events related to the same trade order, and eliminates single points of failure. ​
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A Global Investment Manager Modernizes Fund Product Information Distribution to Increase Data Availability ​

Posted on by kristapsasnins

Case Study

A Global Investment Manager Modernizes Fund Product Information Distribution to Increase Data Availability​

The solution provides a single source of funds related to the reference, pricing, and performance data, distributed to multiple internal and external systems.​​​

Overview

With clients in over 160 countries, this leading Global Investment Management firm provides distinct specialist investment managers, offering boutique specialization globally, bringing extensive capabilities in fixed income, equity, alternatives, and multi-asset solutions.​

Challenge

The client has 80+ global websites and multiple downstream applications that consume product information. The legacy system consisted of numerous de-centralized, sometimes duplicate information stores, resulting in stale, conflicting information. It made it difficult to get to a single source of the truth, impacting public-facing website data and internal risk and compliance applications. Also, the multiple manual processes to cleanse and validate the data were expensive and error-prone. ​

Solution

Ness designed and implemented a data virtualization platform to source data from over 20+ sources (both internal and external), perform data cleansing, create new calculations, and make the data available through API to 50+ consuming applications. We migrated 56 product canonicals with 500+ elements each. Running on an AWS VPC, the solution involved migrating from an on-premise Oracle/MySQL database to an AWS S3 Landing Zone. From S3, the data was injected to a raw zone in Snowflake using Snow Pipes, Lambdas, and other processing units. A curation process made the data available through a special purpose zone for analytics, reporting, and consuming applications and services. ​

Result

The new integrated platform reduced manual processes and re-work, resulting in over $1 million in annual savings. Data availability increased from daily batch to 99% near real-time availability. Also, the platform reduced the time to introduce new data elements and reporting attributes from multiple months to a week. ​

A Leading Provider of Credit Ratings and Market Insight Modernizes their Content and Data Services Platform to Accelerate the Rate of Innovation ​

Posted on by kristapsasnins

Case Study

A Leading Provider of Credit Ratings and Market Insight Modernizes their Content and Data Services Platform to Accelerate the Rate of Innovation

The solution provides a new single platform that accelerates the entire end-to-end process of publishing ratings and market research.​

Overview

The client is the leading provider of credit ratings, credit risk analysis, research, and market insight. They publish 80K+ articles every year, with one million+ outstanding credit ratings.​

Challenge

The client’s credit rating creation and insights publishing were done across several disparate legacy systems. Data collection, content management, analytical tools, and workflow and control capabilities were not meeting the business need for growth, leading to challenges in time to market, lack of standardization, inability to enrich content easily, inability to co-author, and many time-consuming manual processes. The client also struggled with localizing content, resulting in increased time to produce ratings and market insights (which took months). ​

Solution

​Ness designed and implemented an AWS-based scalable microservices platform that provided a single workflow and authoring and editing capabilities. It also standardized article templates, automated data uploading in content formats, implemented content sharing and reused it to achieve “living document”, and enhanced infographics. Technology components included Databricks, Denodo, Kafka for streaming, Postgres, and NoSQL. ​

Result

The new integrated platform accelerated the rate of innovation and decreased the time to produce cycles from many months to weeks. The client could publish ratings and content globally with the ability to localize content. The platform accelerated new product enhancements while significantly improving the end-user benefits of simplicity and standardization upon a single platform with many self-service features. ​

A Leading ISV providing software and solutions to the government sector develops a short-term rental product to achieve improved short-term rental compliance and revenue collection

Posted on by kristapsasnins

Case Study

A Leading ISV providing software and solutions to the government sector develops a short-term rental product to achieve improved short-term rental compliance and revenue collection​

Solution enabled short-term rental tax payment across jurisdictions, improved automated notifications for complaint registry, property non-compliance, delinquency rules, and revenue discrepancies

Overview

The client partners with state and local officials (Government Records Management, Justice, Finance & Tax, Unclaimed Property, etc.) to boost revenue, optimize operations, and deepen community trust.

Challenge

Develop a short-term rental product as a platform to achieve improved short-term rental compliance and revenue collection.

Solution

The developed solution can now get data from 50 different sites. The solution is highly scalable, has ability to scrape data , uses loosely coupled components ensuring different components work together efficiently and components have a well-defined function. The solution was also integrated with external gateways such as Authorise.net. This enabled  short-term rental tax payment across jurisdictions, improved automated notifications for complaint registry, property non-compliance, delinquency rules, and revenue discrepancies (based on actual data scraped) to enable property owners to take action on time. Ness also engineered a highly customizable and configurable rules engine. The solution is enabled by a mobile app that enables users to perform property inspections and create audit logs seamlessly. Ness also played a significant role in implementing DevOps and lean delivery practices for the client.

Result

  • Scalable, cloud-native product that allows rapid solution rollout to new clients.
  • Customizable configuration allows monitoring of listings from multiple counties and jurisdictions.
  • Efficient customer onboarding and role-based access control for better security.

Western Asset Management Migrates Application to the Cloud to Scale Performance​

Posted on by kristapsasnins

Case Study

Western Asset Management Migrates Application to the Cloud to Scale Performance​

The solution migrated the pre-trade compliance engine to the cloud to scale performance.​

Overview

Western Asset is a globally integrated, California-based fixed income asset manager with approximately $450 billion of Assets Under Management (AUM). Risk management is an integral part of the firm’s investment management process.​

Challenge

Western Asset decided to re-architect their pre-trade compliance engine to provide prompt response times to the trading desk for client guideline trading decisions and high-capacity automation between portfolio management and compliance guidelines. Further, they wanted to address peak trade and automation volumes.​
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Solution

Ness designed a modern cloud-based streaming architecture resulting in a scalable, high-performance data and computing fabric. Confluent Cloud served as a messaging bus to orchestrate parallel computation of the compliance rules. We recommended AWS as the infrastructure solution to scale and deliver quickly while exceeding Western Assets’ business objectives. We then developed a POC based on Western Assets’ real need, which allowed teams to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed streaming architecture. ​

Result

The client achieved near-perfect parallelism and massive and near-perfect scaling of millions of calculations. Leveraging Infrastructure as Code, our solution increased peak capacity in line with the future growth.​
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EZOPS Leverages Well-Architected Reviews (WARs) to Deliver an Optimized Environment​

Posted on by kristapsasnins

Case Study

EZOPS Leverages Well-Architected Reviews (WARs) to Deliver an Optimized Environment​

The solution provided a remediation plan for hi-risk items and delivered Infrastructure as a Code.​​​

Overview

EZOPS Inc. is a U.S.-based FinTech firm providing full front-to-back data control software that drives efficiency and dramatically reduces operational costs and resource requirements for financial services institutions.​

Challenge

A fast-growing AI startup, EZOPS found that the time to build and verify secure “sandbox” environments to work with clients was taking too long to create and validate. The company sought options to improve the turnaround time to keep up with the demand. They also wanted to receive a Well-Architected Review so they could address and implement recommendations quickly.​

Solution

EZOPS chose Ness to perform a Well-Architected Review based on recommendations from mutual clients. The solution focused on the Amazon Machine Image (AMI) construction and core AWS build. Ness migrated the manual process of building an environment to Infrastructure as Code in parts.​

  • Part 1: Automation of the AMI build and database setup​
  • Part 2: Convert the manual process to create 27 AWS entities (VPC, EC2, RDS, etc.) to Infrastructure as Code​

Result

Ness delivered a solution within two weeks and automated 72 manual steps. EZOPS can now create an environment in less than one hour that used to take about four days before. Every deployment is fully auditable as all provisions are stored as codes.​

A Leading US Bank Leverages APIX™ to Deliver a New Offering​

Posted on by kristapsasnins

Case Study

A Leading US Bank Leverages APIX™ to Deliver a New Offering​

The solution rolled out a rich functionality to customers’ workstations in their preferred format.​

Overview

The client is a top 3 US bank with a global footprint in more than 100 countries. ​

Challenge

The client’s corporate treasury services department wanted to deliver a new offering leveraging Excel. They wanted to avoid having a dedicated development team to roll out new add-ins since APIs evolve and change continuously. They also wanted to ensure seamless integration between Excel and their API authorization protocols.​

Solution

Ness worked closely with the client to help develop rich Excel templates to extend the client’s service offering to their customers’ desktops. The User Experience (UX) with the templates seamlessly extended the client’s brand and services to Excel, turning it into a true delivery channel rather than an ad-hoc offering. We also provided the ability to pre-configure the templates with authorization parameters, thereby reducing the effort required by the client’s customers to use the templates.​

Result

With APIX™, the client could roll out rich functionality in Excel and move quickly from ideation to adoption at scale. The single add-in could be rapidly deployed across a wide variety of locked-down desktops from Windows 7 through Windows 10.​

Ness Connection: Alexandra Labunova

Posted on by kristapsasnins

Meet Alexandra Labunova. She is a part of the Manufacturing and Transportation Center of Excellence and has been in the Ness family for over half a decade. Alexandra began as a Quality Analyst in Ness Kosice center and diligently climbed the corporate ladder to her current position of Product Owner. In this chat, Alexandra talks about her love for travel, why that first cup of coffee of the day is different, and what she thinks about her colleagues.

Q: Tell us a little bit about your role here at Ness. What do you do?

Here in the Manufacturing and Transportation Center of Excellence of Ness Digital Engineering, we solve our customers’ problems by bringing them new ideas and proposals. We focus on our industry’s trends and best practices to bring in new opportunities. So, when we are working on a new product, my role is not so much towards the technology side, but the business side of it, such as ‘What problem are we solving for our customer?’, ‘How does the solution fit with our customer’s challenge?’, ‘What value we are bringing?’, and so on.
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Q: How did you get started in the industry?

Before I joined Ness, I worked in different roles across different industries, including working for a bank for a while. One of my previous jobs was as a QA engineer for a company, which led me to the role of a QA engineer with Ness in the Manufacturing and Transportation domain. That’s my journey so far.

Q: And is this within the scope of your academic qualification?

It is. I have a degree in electrical engineering, so I guess my work does fall under the same domain.

Q: Is there a piece of career advice that you’ve received from your mentor which has stayed with you throughout your career?

One of the most remarkable pieces of advice I’ve received so far is that when you are applying for a new job, you don’t have to fit the job description perfectly. We often don’t apply for a job because we are afraid that we don’t have one or two qualities of the ten listed in the job description. My mentor taught me that not having some of the required attributes or experiences should not deter you from applying for a job you really like because no one is perfect. You don’t have to possess all the skills; you can always learn them on the job.
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Q: What have been your most significant accomplishments on our team?

(Laughs) I have been a part of many teams through my tenure with Ness, but I don’t think I’ve achieved my best yet. However, this particular project comes to mind when I think of what I have achieved here. This was when I had just joined the team and was a new product owner. It was already late in terms of launching the product. However, I remember taking over, making the MVP smaller and more focused. It allowed the customer to bring it to the market in a very short time. I was delighted to have helped resolve an initial hiccup and the team ended up making the customer happy.

Q: You sure enjoy working with Ness, don’t you? Tell us some of the things you really like about the Ness culture.

It’s a good place to work. The people I work with are both clever and capable, and it feels good to come to work every day. What I like about working with Ness is that it isn’t just work; we also get to know many people, be it through face-to-face conversations or virtual meets with colleagues across the globe.

Q: Speaking of face-to-face conversation, how does it feel to get back to the office? What can you tell us about a typical day in your life?

My day begins with a cup of coffee, no sugar, and lots of milk. It helps me wake up (laughs). Then I have my breakfast and leave for work. Once I am in the office, I get to meet my colleagues; we chit-chat over the coffee machine and talk mostly turns back to work. An exchange of ideas and teamwork always feels special, especially after the pandemic. I end up having a couple more cups of coffee in due course of my day, but the first one is the most important one.
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Q: And did the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns put a dent in your travel plans?

It did. The first two years were very isolating. However, this year I managed to go to Vienna and Budapest. I love to visit cities and immerse myself in the culture of that city. So, I usually plan my vacations around long weekend breaks. I haven’t made any concrete plans for a long summer vacation; however, I am planning to go to Warsaw by the end of June for a few days.

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