With world-leading cloud and Sophis / Fusion Invest experts, Phi Partners provides a seamless transition to a smarter way of managing your trading technology. Find out how.

For many financial markets institutions, the prospect of migrating a complex trading application to the cloud and moving to a fully managed service may be daunting. Over the course of this article, we are going to explain why this needn’t be the case.

With the right partner on side, migration is seamless, painless, robust and secure, delivering a far more performant system with significant operational cost efficiencies.

According to figures from AWS, moving legacy applications to the cloud delivers 31% in infrastructure savings on average. Infrastructure management can become 62% more efficient. Unplanned downtime can be reduced by 69%. The incentives of finding workarounds to the issues preventing cloud adoption are clear.

As a niche trading technology consultancy, Phi Partners is in the privileged position of having spoken to a vast number of organisations in this space and we are familiar with the typical reservations that they hold. In some cases, there are difficulties in creating the business case for a cloud-enabled approach, or in convincing decision makers that the business case is sound. Others may (wrongly) be concerned about security in the cloud. But by far the most common thing we hear from banks is that their systems are too complex, too highly customised, with too many integrations and interfaces to make the switch easy, or even viable. In these instances, banks simply don’t know where to start.

Phi’s new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for Sophis and Fusion Invest provides solutions to all these problems and sets a benchmark for trading application migrations, which we can offer at a fixed price.

The Sophis / Fusion Invest PaaS implementation and discovery frameworks

Our end-to-end service covers every stage of the cloud transformation journey, from strategy and discovery, through to implementation and knowledge transfer, then on to continued service provision. Each phase is shaped by our experts’ deep understanding of the sector, the Finastra technology and industry best practices. The result is a transition that causes minimal disruption to your day-to-day business activities and delivers all the benefits of an optimal cloud-enabled Sophis or Fusion Invest service.

The implementation phase of our PaaS can be split into three separate areas of focus: infrastructure, application and operation. Preceding each of these steps is a robust discovery process.

With every client, as part of our discovery process, we conduct a thorough, upfront analysis of your application environment and specific requirements, and determine how these should affect the cloud architecture design, the service design, or the implementation approach.

Most importantly, the process gives us deep insight into exactly how our clients run Sophis or Fusion Invest at the application level. No two institutions are alike, and none use Sophis or Fusion Invest in exactly the same way. For this reason, discovery is key to designing a bespoke service and implementation plan for every client and ultimately delivering the right solution with all the right configurations, integrations and customisations.

We understand that your needs are unique and highly complex; the bespoke way we implement Sophis / Fusion Invest PaaS is reflective of that.

As with every component of our PaaS, discovery is efficient and simple, with minimal effort or resource required from you as the client.

Transitioning to a cloud infrastructure model

When it comes to moving your infrastructure to the cloud, Phi is uniquely positioned to deliver a solution that’s bespoke to your business. We employ world-leading Finastra and cloud specialists to create a templated, target architecture that adheres to AWS or Azure Well-Architected Frameworks, and is customised according to your specific idiosyncrasies and integration points. The entire process is well defined, tried, tested and proven. This ensures migration is executed effectively, efficiently and securely to provide an operating environment that is more performant, available and cost-effective.

Rigorous testing, all of which is handled by Phi experts rather than your own teams, ensures you can hit the ground running once the migration is complete. We utilise automation across both testing and deployment to make the process quicker and to ensure consistency.

Managing migration at the Sophis / Fusion Invest application level: a highly-customised approach

At the application level, managing the transition to Sophis / Fusion Invest PaaS is extremely nuanced and demands a highly tailored approach. Throughout a process we call ‘operational readiness’, our experts undertake a fastidious learning and engagement process to fully understand how you use the system, how your interfaces are architected, how your batch runs and how automation or improvements may be implemented as part of the migration.

This is not necessary a lift-and-shift procedure. Re-engineering your trading application so it is optimised to this new way of operating is an essential part of unlocking the benefits of cloud migration.

Performance tuning, availability testing and penetration testing make sure your platform will function as expected (or better!) following your transition. Meanwhile, we configure monitoring and alerting at both the hardware and application level to support ongoing error-free operation.

Extensive documentation and automation of your specific operational procedures carried out at this phase deliver consistency and efficiency once migration is complete and the service is fully operational. This knowledge transfer from our teams to yours is a critical part of the implementation process.

Preparing for the PaaS Revolution

The final step in the implementation of Sophis / Fusion Invest PaaS is service readiness. This involves working together to establish service tooling, service governance, SLAs and reporting frameworks – all based on industry standards and configured to your organisational needs. We deploy ITIL4 compliant systems, principles and practices that support a customer-centric, dynamic and value-driven service.

Our PaaS delivers all the advantages of cloud technology, automation and a fully-managed Sophis or Fusion Invest service with minimal impact to your business users. The process is transparent and robust and transition is seamless. Once complete, you move onto the latest version of the trading software in an environment that is scalable, secure, more performant and significantly more cost-effective to run.

With Phi Partners delivering the entire end-to-end package, you can be sure the service is strategically coherent, streamlined and rigorous. Take a smarter, simpler approach with Sophis / Fusion Invest PaaS.

Visit https://www.phipartners.com/sophis-fusion-invest-paas/ to learn more about Sophis / Fusion Invest PaaS, and discover what it can do for you.