Hazelcast for Financial Services

Technologists recognize that the financial services industry is known to have some of the most demanding technology requirements of all sectors of business. Performance, scalability, resilience, security, and efficiency are all required characteristics of data-intensive software architectures in financial services firms.

Hazelcast Platform is widely deployed in many global financial services firms because of its technological innovation that drives critical use cases. Its key advantage is its ability to power business-critical systems that must run fast and be highly available. Hazelcast Platform is a powerful, unified real-time data platform that simplifies application development and modernization to accelerate time-to-market while reducing maintenance overhead and lowering TCO. Many compliance and reporting functions that were previously run end-of-day over several hours are now accelerated to minutes and seconds during business hours. Many trading functions are trending to be as close to zero latency as possible, and the underlying intelligence for risk analysis reporting and trading strategies is growing across multiple data sources.

Hazelcast Benefits

  • Faster time-to-market and lower costs due to simplified development and deployment 
  • Greater efficiency due to higher performance at scale and better resource allocation
  • Minimal downtime due to strong business continuity capabilities and provisions for planned maintenance
  • Protection of sensitive data with built-in security controls

The increased use of technology in business, by consumers, and via social media is resulting in a continuous and exponential rise in the amount of data to be processed. There is an increasing recognition that financial services organizations must use even more data input resources at their disposal. Data sources that once might have seemed peripheral, such as events that capture customer interactions on a web application, now need to be included for any potential competitive advantage.

Specifically to financial services, there is now more in-depth and complex regulation across multiple jurisdictions, with financial services companies having to retain and report on more and more information to prove compliance.

Hazelcast Platform in financial services has proven to deliver:

  • Higher throughput and lower latency for time-sensitive transactions
  • Faster data processing for sophisticated fraud prevention
  • Highly parallelized computations for accelerating large-scale risk calculations
  • Resilience to support stringent business continuity requirements
  • Scale to support rapidly growing workloads across multiple sites
  • Security controls to protect sensitive financial data and personally identifiable information (PII)

Security and Authentication

Hazelcast have put considerable effort into meeting the requirements of a secure enterprise class authenticated IMDG access model. Hazelcast forces all clients to identify themselves before granting access to the IMDG. Authorization allows administrators to define and limit the resources and operations that a user can access. Data security, authentication and authorization is a fundamental requirement for any enterprise data security strategy. With a strong focus on security and authentication, financial services companies can now trade and report on the data in the Hazelcast data fabric knowing that it is being accessed, used and reported on, by authenticated users with an audit trail if required.

Faster Time-to-Market

Hazelcast Platform enables faster time-to-market through simplified application development and deployment by removing the overhead of writing and maintaining code that ties together separate technologies. It uniquely combines a distributed compute engine and a fast data store into a single runtime to process both streaming data and stored data. Instead of using separate technologies that you connect with custom infrastructure code, the unified architecture eliminates the complexities of integrating different capabilities so you can instead focus on coding business logic.

The distributed compute engine is especially useful for keeping data refreshed and up-to-date, to minimize that effort in your applications. Instead of writing application code that continually and redundantly reads and enriches data across different applications, the distributed compute engine can transform data so that it is curated into data products that can be quickly used by any application.

Greater Efficiency

Hazelcast Platform offers greater efficiency to let you get much more output from your hardware infrastructure. This boosts your price-performance output to reduce the cost of your data architecture. This efficiency is a result of the significant performance advantage versus other technologies, which drive higher throughput and lower latency. Hazelcast Platform provides several internal optimizations that take advantage of the CPU resources available in a cluster, so that you can deploy applications that run faster and deliver more output than other technologies can offer.

Hazelcast Platform starts with a fast data store that leverages an in-memory architecture to deliver the fastest data access speeds. The fast storage capabilities along with the processing power of a distributed compute engine let you build and run applications that process data where the data lives. This data-local model not only reduces the latency of passing huge amounts of data over the network, but also makes greater use of the available CPU power in the cluster that storage-focused systems (e.g., databases) do not.

Reduced Downtime

Hazelcast Platform provides business continuity capabilities to minimize downtime due to infrastructure failures. Its WAN Replication copies updated data to a remote cluster in a variety of configurations, such as active-active, active-passive, and any combination with more than two clusters. Replication is done on an incremental level to minimize network traffic and to ensure quick updates to support a low recovery point objective (RPO). Along with WAN Replication, Hazelcast Platform provides an Automatic Disaster Recovery Failover feature that lets applications automatically connect to a secondary cluster if the primary cluster is down. This feature helps businesses simplify their low recovery time objectives (RTO). Financial services customers use the Hazelcast business continuity capabilities to support their RPO 0 and RTO 0 goals.

Hazelcast Platform also minimizes planned downtime with features such as Blue-Green Deployment support. This feature simplifies the process of building a staging cluster (the “green” cluster) alongside a production cluster (the “blue cluster”) and then switching all application connections from the blue cluster to the green cluster in a controlled way. Should any unexpected errors occur in the formerly green cluster, Hazelcast Platform makes it easy to revert applications back to the original blue cluster. Hazelcast Platform also supports other features such as rolling upgrades and job upgrades so you can run maintenance and upgrade tasks while the cluster is running in a product environment without taking the cluster down.

Protection of Sensitive Data

Hazelcast has put considerable effort into meeting the requirements of a secure, enterprise-class, authenticated access model. Hazelcast Platform provides a full built-in security suite that includes authentication and authorization for role-based access controls, leveraging the Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS) standard. Hazelcast Platform forces all clients to identify themselves before granting access to the data. Authorization allows administrators to define and limit the resources and operations that a user can access. Data security, authentication, and authorization is a fundamental requirement for any enterprise data security strategy. With a strong focus on security and authentication, financial services companies can now trade and report on the data in the Hazelcast data fabric, knowing that it is being accessed, used, and reported on by authenticated users with an audit trail if required.

Hazelcast Platform also provides over-the-wire encryption to prevent eavesdropping on network traffic between Hazelcast nodes, as well as between applications and Hazelcast clusters. Its SSL/TLS implementation is optimized to only incur a minimal performance cost to ensure that businesses do not have to make a significant compromise when protecting their data.

Use Case Examples

Hazelcast Platform provides the speed, scale, and reliability to run many types of business-critical use cases such as:

  • Algorithmic trading
  • Real-time trade monitoring
  • EOD and intraday risk analysis
  • Market data applications
  • Financial exchanges
  • Value at risk calculations
  • Monte Carlo simulations
  • Market message caching
  • Derivatives trading
  • Pricing calculations
  • Portfolio risk analysis
  • Post trading processes

Example Customer Deployments

Below are just a few examples of how Hazelcast has helped financial services firms around the world.

Leading Payment Card Services Provider

A global payment card services provider leverages Hazelcast Platform in many distinct use cases that require the speed that consumers expect when making payments. In addition, any downtime results in lost revenue, not only for the card services provider but also for the merchants that the provider works with. Hazelcast Platform provides the resilience to run the 24/7 operations of payment processing.

Several global banks run their payment processing offerings on Hazelcast Platform because of their performance and reliability requirements. One bank, in particular, received an award for best payment processing system by a notable financial services trade magazine, which was possible due to the use of Hazelcast Platform.

With the many steps required to process a payment, every bit of introduced latency will impact the ability of banks to meet their SLAs and retain competitive advantage. The Hazelcast advantage makes sure they complete a transaction as quickly as possible in a reliable way.

A leading card issuing bank was able to reduce fraud loss by $100M per year by implementing a more sophisticated fraud check that required the performance advantages offered by Hazelcast Platform. They were able to run multiple fraud checks in parallel to create a composite, ML-based fraud detection score that resulted in greater accuracy to stop more fraudulent transactions. Hazelcast Platform provided the speed in a cost-effective hardware footprint to reduce the architectural complexity while achieving their business goals of reducing fraud.