Cloud-based living has opened up blue-sky opportunities for MMC and its clients, according to chief, Vedran Babic.
In a new case study tracking the investment administration firm’s shift from servers to the Microsoft Azure platform over the last year or so, Babic says MMC now has the technology “required to cater for our clients’ business growth and to welcome new clients to our community”.
“Our clients will benefit from faster response times and our open architecture facilitates connectivity with the global ecosystem such as Bloomberg, Interactive Data, Refinitiv, DTCC, SWIFT, Calastone, Salesforce, etc,” he says.
Babic says the Azure move has also “improved our ability to scale up at a moment’s notice and see performance levels increase”.
“Moving forward, MMC will continue harnessing latest technology which includes leveraging Platform as a Service (PaaS) and be completely serverless. MMC are also building capabilities around data analytics — providing insights to investors and clients…”
Interestingly, MMC opted to first move its 2019 acquisition, the Aegis investment platform previously owned by ASB, to the cloud ahead of the core fund administration system.
The firm bought Aegis, now rebranded as MMC Wealth Adminstration, late in 2019 with the platform well overdue for an upgrade.
Craig Richardson, MMC chief information officer, says soon after buying Aegis – then holding about $15 billion – the first decision was to transfer “the entire wealth administration platform to a more secure and scalable Azure environment”.
“The project had added complexity as, in parallel, we were migrating the technology from ASB to MMC,” Richardson says. “Despite this, the wealth administration platform, Artios, was transferred to the cloud in less than six months including the operational environment, interfaces and moving to Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD).”
Following the Aegis transition, he says MMC shifted its in-house built fund administration system, NeXus, to Azure – partnering with technology specialist Lancom – in several stages during the COVID-19 lockdowns last year.
“Since our move to Azure cloud, we are no longer constrained by the physical world,” Richardson says. “We are past the sizing limitations — we can quickly reconfigure our servers. Our architecture constitutes a secure and open platform that will cater for growth and innovation while also simplifying system maintenance and upgrades.”
Microsoft has picked up several big-name global clients for its Azure cloud service over the last 12 months including the BlackRock Aladdin platform and index provider MSCI.