In the realm of Capital Markets IT, financial institutions are challenged by the high costs, operational complexity, and prolonged time-to-market associated with managing proprietary trading and risk management systems. Individually, IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS cannot fully address these issues. However, Yoter Up advocates for an integrated Trading-Systems-as-a-Service (TSaaS) model, which encompasses the entire IT infrastructure stack delivered as a unified service, unlocking significant additional value:

• Reduced Complexity: By shifting system ownership and management to a trusted third-party provider, banks eliminate the burdens of system maintenance and operational distractions, enabling a sharper focus on business expansion and minimizing upfront capital expenditures.
• Accelerated Time-to-Market: Establishing complex DevOps and automation frameworks around intricate front-to-risk-to-back-office platforms traditionally demands substantial investment and time. TSaaS solutions incorporate these capabilities natively, speeding deployment and operational readiness.
• Enhanced Security: Leading cloud platforms have developed robust security protocols, including stringent data access controls and layered security measures. TSaaS leverages these features, offering financial institutions enterprise-grade security without additional overhead costs.
• Improved Data Access and Analytics: Banking data typically resides in fragmented silos, complicating comprehensive reporting and holistic business insights. TSaaS consolidates disparate systems into a unified cloud architecture, enhancing secure and streamlined data access and actionable intelligence.
• Cost Efficiency and Transparency: These operational benefits contribute to lowering total cost of ownership for IT systems. More importantly, TSaaS provides clear cost visibility, allowing banks to adjust service consumption dynamically in response to changing business demands.
• Faster Cost-to-Revenue Realization: Contrary to assumptions favoring custom development, the post-trade lifecycle after trade confirmation is largely standardized across various financial institutions, whether investment banks, buy-side, sell-side, treasury, or commodities firms. This standardization enables banks to share platforms, reduce costs, and unlock new revenue streams by opening their trading infrastructures to external participants.

Yoter Up understands that implementation paths vary significantly depending on each bank’s strategic priorities. Three common deployment patterns include:

Balancing Legacy Systems and Innovation:

Banks may choose to offload the complexity of managing core technology stacks to third-party TSaaS providers, thereby freeing internal resources to prioritize innovation and new solution development while maintaining operational continuity.

• Key considerations: Establish clear service scope, Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and integration points with upstream and downstream systems. Ensure ongoing business support and rapid decision-making to sustain service quality.

Cost Optimization Strategy:

Institutions with mature, fully operational trading and risk platforms seek to reduce costs by sharing platform usage with other banks and financial firms under a service charge model.

• Key considerations: Develop robust operational models for platform maintenance and upgrades, ensuring consistent performance and ease of management for all users.

Accelerated Time-to-Market Focus:

Banks eager to launch new products rapidly often cannot afford traditional legacy implementation timelines of 6 to 9 months. They adopt tactical TSaaS platforms to drastically shorten product launch cycles.

• Key considerations: Manage coexistence of legacy and TSaaS platforms, and plan for the long-term evolution toward cloud-native infrastructure.