At Blankfactor, our teams build complex digital products that drive business value and transformation — and we do that for some of the world’s most data-intensive, security-focused industries.
That’s why we’ve had a decade-long partnership with leading financial technology companies that deliver cutting-edge solutions in banking and capital markets, payments, and wealth management.
From data modernization to instant fraud detection, we’re helping our clients power innovation in financial services. And in the process, we’re delivering significant revenue and cost savings to leading companies.
Modernizing risk management in capital markets
One of our major financial services clients is leading the way with automation innovation in capital markets, accelerating mission-critical monitoring and rapidly identifying fraud and market manipulation.
With a suite of data solutions, our client is giving firms the power to analyze data, prevent financial crime, ensure regulatory compliance, and handle case management. The technology behind these products leverages the power of data and artificial intelligence to conduct monitoring and detect risk signals in real-time.
Working hand-in-hand with the client, our team of technical architects and data engineers supported the expansion of the data product’s ecosystem, designing and delivering optimizations for two business-critical systems: surveillance and auditing.
Designing a cost-effective, high-performant data system in Snowflake
The client’s surveillance tool is built to detect market manipulation and risk areas by analyzing large volumes of public market and client data. But the client needed a new system architecture to accommodate an even larger amount of data.
Our team leveraged the highly scalable architecture in Snowflake for the client’s financial data solution. Not only could the new system accommodate higher data volumes, but it could detect four times more market manipulation threats in near real-time.
For this project, it was just as crucial to revamp the front end of the legacy system and optimize the user interface, including data correction functionality. After our team redesigned the UI in Snowflake for both the surveillance and auditing systems, the client saw a major boost in performance.
The legacy system permitted just one data row correction at a time and a 10-second validation time. With the new Snowflake design, users could correct millions of records in less than 8 seconds.
Over 50% legacy system cost savings following cloud migration
Through our client’s auditing product, firms can quickly detect errors and ensure the most accurate submissions to FINRA. But the system was built on a private cloud, which was growing costly for the client to maintain.
Through our partnership, we designed and delivered a migration in Snowflake that unlocked a time and cost savings of 50%. Today, the auditing tool is a more cost-effective, cloud-enabled system powered by agile Snowflake features, which translates into competitive advantages in client onboarding and beyond.
Innovating retirement in the cloud
Another of our clients, an independent investment management firm offering retirement solutions, was looking to offer more flexible products and services that meet their clients’ needs across devices — and they needed to accelerate financial services innovation and technology solutions.
Our engineers supported the client in their digital transformation of a legacy retirement data environment, designing and developing a next-generation Retirement as a Service (RaaS) product from end to end.
Our team of technical architects, product and project managers, and elite engineers supported the client’s team of over 600 employees in this decade-long, $1 billion project.
Streamlining legacy data systems and building an agile RaaS platform
Our client had begun a data migration project but faced a significant problem: users were consuming the data in both the old and new systems. They needed to reduce their data footprint and manage the double cost of maintaining both systems.
And the project came with an even bigger vision. The client wanted to streamline legacy systems and design a fresh, optimized data ecosystem — the basis of a cloud-enabled retirement product.
This innovative utility tool would give the client business-critical insights and engage their consumers with important retirement data and planning tools.
Data insights in near real-time while protecting security
Our investment management client serves thousands of institutional clients and manages trillions of retirement assets. Given this volume of records, our team needed to ensure that our client’s range of data sources flowed seamlessly and were effectively restructured to run analytics.
With a data product of this complexity, our team’s approach involved designing a custom data storage and computing system in Snowflake: an efficient, cost-effective solution when both data security and agility are a priority.
Our team leveraged several key features in the Snowflake cloud.
- Separation of storage and computing resources. We ensured scalability and cost efficiency by isolating the resources needed for data processing from each source.
- Hybrid orchestration design. Combining schedule-based and event-driven data load processes enabled us to speed up the time it takes for clients to see new data in their reports. This means new data is visible within minutes rather than hours.
- Data sharing features. Our team seamlessly shared processed data with the client’s architects for ad-hoc analysis, reporting, or even machine learning model training. With Snowflake’s data-sharing features, we ensured that personal identifiable information (PII) data is protected by the latest industry standards.
- Dynamic data masking feature. Leveraging data masking allowed our team to significantly speed up data load processes. Rather than relying on a complex, costly, and time-consuming encryption process for all client data, we balanced our encryption model with data masking policies in Snowflake. This allowed us to encrypt only the most sensitive data while leaving less sensitive data masked with the native masking support in Snowflake.
Designing smarter visualizations and business intelligence tools
Building a cloud-enabled data environment comes with the challenge of designing reporting and interface tools for users that are just as flexible and robust as the underlying back end.
And our team needed to build a design with three main user groups in mind — the client’s internal users, retirement product clients, and consumers.
To do that, we delivered:
- Seamless visualization: Our team moved the client’s reporting system from BusinessObjects to a boutique business intelligence cloud environment tailor-made for financial services. Users can access custom visualizations and scripts, all while ensuring underlying data protection.
- Streamlined and optimized analytics: The client began the project with a BI system that produced approximately 4,000 – 5,000 reports. But our team consolidated and optimized the system’s operations, reducing the footprint to 660 reports — a 78% decrease in unnecessary systems and associated compute costs.
With Blankfactor, power financial services innovation and business impact
Finding the right digital solutions partner can power your business forward, accelerating cost optimization, creating new revenue streams, and transforming your business through digital – for the long term.
We don’t just deliver elite engineering solutions custom-made for your business. At Blankfactor, we help you leverage the latest technologies — from data engineering to enterprise AI to digital product development — to capture opportunities and transform your business. From financial services to insurance to life sciences, we’re ready to engineer impact.
Looking to take the next step with your digital roadmap? Our expert consultants can help you ideate next-level solutions to your biggest challenges in just one hour. Contact our team for a 60-minute solution session today.
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