Written by Ignotas (Iggy) Turskis
Solution Lead
How a Leading UK Bank Leveraged Google Cloud to Achieve Compliance with a Competitive Edge
THE CHALLENGE
One of the UK’s leading retail and commercial banks saw the Market in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) II legislation as not just a compliance exercise but an opportunity. In essence, the regulation was mandating the introduction of technologies, particularly a universal data repository, that the company had been trying to progress for some time. By aggregating all the data required for compliance purposes into a single repository, their MiFID solution could also serve a business intelligence platform for the entire business.
THE SOLUTION
An initial RFI to around 40 vendors revealed, to no-one’s surprise as the technical standards had only just been released, that no single solution covered the entirety of the MiFID requirements. Consequently, any MiFID solution would require those affected to license a variety of different products and incur very significant fixed costs. The decision was then made to create a bespoke solution whereby the bank would own the intellectual property of the resulting solution and avoid licensing fees.
The bank approached Google who put it in touch with Appsbroker, a Google Premium Partner for Financial Services and the Google Cloud Platform’s largest European partner, who were given the contract to build out the Proof of Concept with little more than a year to go before the legislation came into force.
As this was a very comprehensive and challenging project, no other proposed solution for the MiFID legislation provided such depth of functionality across all of the asset classes, the rigour of Appsbroker’s Agile development methodology was crucial to the success of the project.
THE RESULTS
The client was one of the few trading entities that successfully met the MiFID II deadline. But perhaps more importantly for its long-term sustainability, the Appsbroker solution has done the hard work of collecting, aggregating, normalising and cleaning the data from a very diverse and heterogeneous set of sources. In doing so, it has created a treasure trove of information the bank will now use to better manage individual clients and the business overall.
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