Fin Tech

Financial Markets Trading Systems must be highly available. Trading firms make millions of dollars by having fast and reliable trading systems, which may lead you to believe that is why they need to be highly available. However, the real need for high availability in trading systems is that many trading firms no longer have the means to manually place a trade. If their systems are not available, then trades cannot be placed, resulting in a significant loss of money for both the company and its clients.
Systems must be highly available in the global banking market as well in order to support the continuous movement of money through numerous time zones around the globe.
E-commerce is yet another example of systems that require high availability. Suppose your favourite online bookstore or online clothing store website would suddenly not be available. What would you do? Would you wait on buying that book, CD, or new bathing suit until the web site is up again? Or would you simply go to another online store and buy it there? Retailers generally don’t want to take the chance of losing your business.
Better yet, consider an online auction website such as Amazon or eBay. What do you suppose your reaction would be if you were seconds away from finally getting that pet rock you’ve always wanted and the web site went down? Companies such as these have a reputation to maintain – if their site is not available, people will go elsewhere.

Modernization trends in FinTech Fin Tech

Software intensive systems e.g. real time trading software
Software is crucial to success of today’s financial systems
Focus on quality of software
Global e-commerce, NetBanking, Banking and finance
Hedge funds running ther own software and data centers

Challenges that came along with the Modernization

Most of the hedge fund software applications are home grown
Propritery architecture and complexity of scale
Application availability impacts revenues
Banking operations subject to data center services availability
Difficulty in monitoring of different software systems seamlessly by a single HA Software
Payment gateway software availability is backbone of e-commerce companies

Impact

High frequency of UK banking outages from data mandated by the FCA

Analysis of IT outages at UK banks, evident in data mandated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) since August 2018, reveals them to occur at least once a month at each current account provider.

Barclays has emerged as having the highest number of incidents, with 41 over the nine months up to the end of 2018.

Top 4 British banks experienced 64 outages in the second quarter of 2018 alone.

Whilst there may not be a shared cause behind these outages, what they do have in common is that the companies which suffered from them all made mistakes in overestimating the capabilities of their IT systems, employing too many legacy systems or simply not keeping their system health in check. All of this highlights the need for financial institutions to put more of a priority on routine IT operations, and specifically focus on what they can do to minimise downtime.

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New York Stock Exchange outage raises concerns about critical systems

The recent NYSE outage raises concerns about the resiliency of critical infrastructure systems to accidental and maliciously triggered glitches.

The unspecified system malfunction halted all trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) for an unprecedented three-plus hours Wednesday and first surfaced shortly after trading began Wednesday. The problem initially affected only customers who had submitted orders for some 200 smaller stocks listed on the exchange.

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