Next-gen technology turbocharges banking and financial services
The power of smart tech applications integrated with cloud to automate and streamline complex operations.
Next-gen technology turbocharges banking and financial services
The power of smart tech applications integrated with cloud to automate and streamline complex operations.
Banking & Financial Services
Experience
Capital Markets &
Investment Banking
Optimizing trading processes by enhancing electronic trading platforms through real-time pricing, seamless trade capture and execution, and streamlined front-to-back integration
Brokerage, Wealth &
Asset Management
Elevating customer and advisor experience through digitized onboarding, modernized trading platforms, electronic money movement, on-demand custom analytics, and enhanced portfolio management and reporting
Risk &
Compliance
Guiding customers to navigate complexities of risk management through tailored solutions that cater to risk identification and assessment, stress testing, capital planning, reporting and analytics
Commercial &
Corporate Banking
Transforming banking through effective frameworks for contact management and campaign tracking; automated client onboarding; modernized origination and credit facility management; advanced portfolio management and harmonized document management
Anti-Money Laundering &
Know-Your-Customer
Empowering financial institutions to combat money laundering through an integrated AML solution of metadata management, advanced transaction surveillance, and enhanced visualizations, and to remain compliant through stringent employee due diligence and KYC procedures
Retail Banking &
Payments
Modernize high-value payments, enrich payment modes for e-commerce, and automate cash administration to improve cash flow management and increase speed, flexibility, and security
Client Success Stories
Our Leaders
How Gen AI can enhance software engineering
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Get in touchEnterprise-Grade DevOps for Scalable Blockchain DLT
Enhance the scalability, resilience, and performance of blockchain DLT platforms with enterprise-grade DevOps and SRE practices.
Client
A leading provider of real-world asset (RWA) tokenization, digital currency, and interoperability solutions to the world’s largest financial players
Goal
To optimize blockchain DLT platforms for scalability, resilience, and seamless operations through enterprise-grade DevOps and SRE practices
Tools and Technologies
R3 Corda 5, Azure, AWS, G42, Docker, Kubernetes, Helm Charts, Terraform, Ansible, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, Jenkins, Prometheus, Grafana, Slack Integration
Business Challenge
Complex Multi-Node Deployments require a mechanism to upgrade CorDapps, notaries, and workers across network participants without downtime or compatibility issues. Meanwhile, security and compliance risks demand strict access controls, network segmentation, and security hardening to protect Corda nodes and ledger operations.
For infrastructure scalability and automation, an efficient approach was required for onboarding new participants and managing network topology across cloud environments. The lack of a Real-Time Monitoring system necessitated the detection of transaction failures, tracking node health, and providing proactive alerts.
To address security vulnerabilities, continuous scanning and security enforcement across CorDapps, containerized nodes, and CI/CD pipelines were required.
Solution
- Enabled zero-downtime CorDapp deployments with automated rollback and stateful upgrades, ensuring stability and ledger integrity
- Secured Corda nodes with RBAC, network segmentation, and security hardening, while optimizing autoscaling for dynamic ledger workloads
- Automated Corda network topology and participant onboarding using modular Terraform & Ansible configurations, ensuring scalability and repeatability
- Implemented real-time monitoring with Prometheus & Grafana, with Slack-based alerts for transaction failures and node health anomalies
- Ensured high availability and auto-healing for Corda network nodes and ledger operations
- Integrated DevSecOps with automated vulnerability scanning for CorDapps, containerized nodes, and CI/CD pipelines
Outcomes
- Accelerated blockchain deployment cycles through CI/CD automation increased deployment frequency by 40% and reduced failures by 60%
- Optimized kubernetes workloads for Corda 5 through efficient resource management resulted in 15% cost savings and improved ledger performance
- Scalable & secure blockchain infrastructure reduced manual intervention by 30%, enabling seamless scaling of Corda network participants
- Proactive incident management for DLT networks through real-time monitoring cut response time by 50% for blockchain issues, ensuring high availability
- Automated workflows accelerated development cycles by 25%, enhancing collaboration across blockchain and DevOps teams
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Gen AI platform offers future-ready capabilities
BANKING & FINANCIAL SERVICES
Gen AI platform offers future-ready capabilities
Intuitive Generative AI platform provides AI, integration, and end-use capabilities and forward-looking roadmaps for the risk teams and business users at a leading bank.
Client
A leading North American bank
Goal
Provide a wide range of AI capabilities for various risk and business teams and avoid building fragmented, outdated systems
Tools and Technologies
Amazon Bedrock and Titan V2, pgvector, Faiss, OpenSearch, Llama 7B, Claude Sonnet 3.5 and 3.7
Business Challenge
The Enterprise Risk function at a leading North American bank initiated a Generative AI (Gen AI) solution to offer a wide range of AI capabilities, including document intelligence, summarization, generation, translation, and more.
As the project evolved through proofs of concept and pilots, a key challenge emerged: the risk of creating a fragmented ecosystem with an overwhelming array of unmanageable bespoke solutions, model integrations, and reliance on potentially outdated models and libraries.
Solution
Based on prior engagements across clients, our team delivered thought leadership around how to develop and deliver capabilities using a platform approach. We also set up a Minimum Viable Product Team to iterate on new problem areas and solution approaches. Platform development includes generalized capabilities for:
- Setting up document ingestion pipelines, with choice of parsing approaches, embedding models and vector index stores
- A factory model along with configurations for integrating new parsers, embedding models, LLM interfaces etc., to quickly bring new capabilities to the platform
- User management, SSO integration, entitlements management
- API integration to bring in information/ data from internal and external sources
- Platform support of pgvector, Faiss, OpenSearch, Amazon Titan V2, Llama 7B, Claude Sonnet 3.5, and 3.7, etc.
- Intuitive chat interface for AI Masters - designated business users trained in Prompt Engineering and other techniques to assemble new AI/Gen AI capabilities for users through configuration - and end users
Outcomes
- A future-ready Gen AI platform that can easily incorporate new capabilities and updates
- Multiple specific capabilities, called skills, for use by various risk teams and business users
- A forward-looking roadmap, including ability to compose more complex capabilities using atomic capabilities
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Data migration to cloud expedites credit risk functions
Migrating on-premises models and data to the cloud enhances financial forecasting, sensitivity analysis, and time-to-market.
Client
A leading North American bank
Goal
Migrate credit risk data and SAS-based analytics models from on-premises data warehouse to AWS to enhance functionality
Tools and Technologies
AWS Glue, Redshift, DataSync, Athena, CloudWatch, SageMaker; Apache Airflow; Delta Lake; Power BI
Business Challenge
The credit risk unit of a major bank aimed to migrate SAS-based analytics models containing data for financial forecasting and sensitivity analysis to Amazon SageMaker.
This was to leverage benefits such as enhanced scalability, improved maintenance for MLOps engineers, and better developer experience. It also sought to migrate credit risk data from a Netezza-based on-premises data warehouse to AWS, utilizing a data lake on AWS S3 and a data warehouse on Redshift to support model migration.
Solution
- Decoupled data workload processing from relational systems using the phased approach with a focus on historical migration, transformational complexities, data volumes, and ingestion frequencies of the incremental loads
- Developed a flexible ETL framework using DataSync for extracting data to AWS as flat files from Netezza
- Transformed data in S3 layers using Glue ETL and moved it to the Redshift data warehouse
- Enabled Glue integration with Delta Lake for incremental data workloads
- Built ETL workflows using Step Functions during orchestration and concurrent runs of the workflow; orchestrated the concurrent runs of workflows using Apache Airflow
- Architected data shift from Netezza to AWS, leveraging a flexible ETL framework
Outcomes
- Enhanced financial forecasting and sensitivity analysis operations with analytical models and data migrated to the AWS public cloud
- Expedited time-to-market catering to client’s downstream consumption needs through Power BI and Amazon SageMaker
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Transforming payment processing for banking channels
Streamlined payments architecture delivers flexible workflow orchestration, system scalability, and improved data reporting.
Client
A leading Australian bank
Goal
Streamline the payment transaction lifecycle to handle increasing volume and complexity
Tools and Technologies
Jenkins, Kubernetes, Spring, Oracle, PostgresSQL, AWS, Docker, Kafka, Java
Business Challenge
Multiple banking channels - mobile, internet and branch - initiate various payment requests (20+ types such as ACH, mandate and book transfer) that need to be processed. Depending on the payment type, the channel was required to invoke one or more services in a specific order as per the associated business rules.
Changes to these payment workflows stemming from introduction of new payment types or revisions of business rules introduced complex and repeated changes to the bank’s systems, hindering scalability.
Solution
- To support lifecycle management of various payment transactions, including defining different payment workflows, we designed an event-driven architecture comprised of 40+ microservices (e.g., limit, eligibility, and fraud checks, etc.) supported by a Kafka message queuing system
- The architecture involved building an orchestration engine (landing service), acting as a front controller for all payment workflow requests from the various banking channels, such as mobile, internet and branch
- The landing service in turn invokes the corresponding service (limit, eligibility, etc.) based on the payment type and business rules associated with it
- Data flow between these microservices (resulting from further invocations) and other downstream systems is facilitated asynchronously with the help of a distributed messaging system (Kafka)
- Using Jenkins, we built a CI/CD pipeline to streamline the workflow by automatically building, testing and deploying code changes as they are committed
Outcomes
- Significantly eased the management of payment workflows, including those related to the addition of new payment types (resulting from an acquisition)
- Enabled systems to scale without introducing complex changes at the channels
- Improved reporting, resulting from faster access to data through dedicated microservices
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Modernized Payments Hub Improves UX and Compliance
Modernized core payments engine elevates client experience through seamless integration and increased functionality.
Client
U.S. operations of a leading Japanese bank
Goal
Modernize payments architecture to streamline processing and improve client experience
Tools and Technologies
Jenkins, Kafka, Spring, Oracle, JBoss, React, Elastic Search, Java, Node.js
Business Challenge
The evolving payments landscape, with the introduction of ISO 20022 and the dynamic nature of the regulatory environment, necessitated advancement in the bank’s payment processing capabilities.
The lack of a modern architecture hindered client experience, with multiple channels initiating various payment types that required complex processing.
Solution
Our team built a centralized payments hub to orchestrate data flows between payment initiation systems and product processors. The steps:
- Designed a flexible and scalable microservices-based architecture to facilitate translation, enrichment and processing of payment transactions
- Built a messaging layer to streamline data flows between systems, through support for various modes of interaction, e.g., MQ, API and file (canonical / industry standards such as NACHA, SWIFT, JSON, etc.)
- Introduced an API gateway to handle multiple payment types to enable channel agnostic payment capabilities
- Deployed a modular approach to support existing and new systems with isolation of core and product processors and avoid redundancies in capability builds
- Developed a React-based UI as the touchpoint for integrations between the payments hub and other systems
Outcomes
- A core payments engine capable of seamlessly integrating with multiple, complex systems
- Superior client experience, resulting from a holistic view spanning initiation, payment rails, and clearing
- A modernized payments platform that is ISO 20022-compliant and future-ready for processing and reporting needs
- Faster implementation of functionalities for payment processors
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Quality engineering optimizes a DLT platform
Reliability, availability, scalability, observability, and resilience ensured; release cycles and testing time improve 75% and 80%.
Client
A leading provider of financial services digitization solutions
Goal
Reliability assurance for a digital ledger technology (DLT) platform
Tools and Technologies
Kotlin, Java, Http Client, AWS, Azure, GCP, G42, OCP, AKS, EKS, Docker, Kubernetes, Helm Chart, Terraform
Business Challenge
A leader in Blockchain-based digital financial services required assurance for non-GUI (Graphic User Interface), Command Line Interface (CLI), microservices and Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs for a Digital Ledger Technology (DLT) platform, as well as platform reliability assurance on Azure, AWS services (EKS, AKS) to ensure availability, scalability, observability, monitoring and resilience (disaster recovery). It also wanted to identify capacity recommendations and any performance bottlenecks (whether impacting throughput or individual transaction latency) and required comprehensive automation coverage for older and newer product versions and management of frequent deliveries of multiple DLT product versions on a monthly basis.
Solution
- 130+ Dapps were developed and enhanced on the existing automation framework for terminal CLI and cluster utilities
- Quality engineering was streamlined with real-time dashboarding via Grafana and Prometheus
- Coverage for older and newer versions of the DLT platform was automated for smooth, frequent deliverables for confidence in releases
- The test case management tool, Xray, was implemented for transparent automation coverage
- Utilities were developed to execute a testing suite for AKS, EKS, local MAC/ Windows/ Linux cluster environments to run on a daily or as-needed basis
Outcomes
- Automation shortened release cycles from 1x/month to 1x/week; leads testing time was reduced by 80%
- Test automation coverage with 2,000 TCs was developed, with pass rate of 96% in daily runs
- Compatibility was created across AWS-EKS, Azure-AKS, Mac, Windows, Linux and local cluster
- Increased efficiency in deliverables was displayed, along with an annual $350K savings for TCMs
- An average throughput of 25 complete workflows per second was sustained
- Achieved a 95th percentile flow-completion time that should not exceed 10 seconds
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Women in Payments Canada Symposium 2024
Women in Payments Canada Symposium 2024
Meet our Toronto-based experts, Subramanian Viswanathan and Suneela Katikala, at the Symposium to learn about advanced technology solutions for the banking, financial services and payments industries.
Each year, the Global Association of Women Leaders in Payments hosts annual forums in several regions around the world for women payments professionals to connect, share ideas, learn the latest trends and challenges in fintech and the payments market, and to advance change.
This year’s Women in Payments Canada Symposium will be held at Arcadian Court in Toronto, Ontario, on September 24-25, 2024. The theme, Women Leading in Generative AI, will be in focus as women leaders and various presenters share their perspectives on a range of topics impacting the payments ecosystem.
As a key provider of technology services to leading Canadian and global banks, including those operating in the retail banking and payments sector, two of Iris’ banking and financial services experts will participate in the 2024 Symposium. Connect there with Subramanian Viswanathan, Associate Vice President, Financial Services Practice, and Suneela Katikala, Senior Client Partner, Financial Services, to discuss digital transformation and payment system modernization.
Learn how banks and associated entities apply Iris’ deep domain knowledge and experience and advanced technology solutions - in AI / ML, Application Development, Automation, Cloud, DevOps, Data Science, Enterprise Analytics, Integrations, and Quality Engineering - to enhance security, scalability, cost-efficiency, and compliance in the myriad platforms, processes and systems supporting domestic and international payments transactions – involving clearing, settlement, currency, etc. Iris is PCIDSS 4.0-certified to ensure robust cyber security and compliance for our clients involved in payment card processing or that store, process, or transmit cardholder data and/or sensitive authentication data.
Contact our team and obtain more information about future-ready Iris Software Banking and Financial Services. You can also read our Perspective Paper on the state of Central Bank Digital Currency.
Read our Gen AI success stories here: https://www.irissoftware.com/stories/.
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Get in touchGen AI summarization solution aids lending app users
Conversational agent built with Gen AI eases commercial lenders’ access to information, use of complex applications, and integration of new users.
Client
Commercial banking unit of a large Canadian bank
Goal
Help lenders access information for complex lending applications on more timely basis and simplify onboarding of new users
Tools and Technologies
PyPDF2, Meta
Business Challenge
As a part of the credit adjudication process for a transaction, commercial bankers use an application to create summaries, memos and rating alerts as needed, which are instrumental for ongoing Capital at Risk (CaR) monitoring, Risk Profiling, Risk Adjusted Return on Capital (RAROC) computations, etc.
There is a significant amount of complexity involved in understanding this application due to the diversity in types of borrowers / loans, nature of collaterals, etc., e.g., How to create a transaction report for my deal? How to update an existing deal?
All of this information is spread across multiple user guides and FAQ documents that may run into hundreds of pages.
Solution
- Ringfenced a knowledge base comprised of the user guides of various functionalities (e.g., facility creation, borrower information, etc.)
- Built a custom-developed, React-based front-end for the conversational assistant to interact with the users
- Parsed, formatted and extracted text chunks from these documents using libraries such as PDF Miner, PyPDF2
- Created vector embeddings using sentence transformer embedding model (all-MiniLM-L6-v2) and stored as indices in the Facebook AI Similarity Search (FAISS) vector database
- Broke down the user query into vector embeddings, searched against the vector database and leveraged local LLM (Llama-2-7B-chat) to generate summarized responses based on the context passed to it by the similarity search
Outcomes
Our custom solution was a conversational agent built using Generative AI, which summarizes relevant information from multiple documents.
It significantly:
- Improved existing users’ ability to access relevant information on a timely basis
- Simplified the migration of bankers and integrations of lending applications resulting from merger or acquisition
Our experts can help you find the right solutions to meet your needs.
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Meet us at the Open Banking Expo in Toronto
Meet us at the Open Banking Expo in Toronto
Learn from client partners, Suneela Katikala and Pallavi Bhargava, how our tech solutions advance the digital transformation of banks, financial services and payments providers.
Meet Suneela Katikala and Pallavi Bhargava, our experienced client partners in the banking, financial services and payments technology space, at the Open Banking Expo on June 11, 2024 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre in Ontario, Canada.
As financial institutions strive to rapidly implement the open banking initiative in Canada - more collaborative, secure, and efficient banking and payment systems - it is imperative that they work with technology providers with demonstrated agility, knowledge and IT expertise in these areas. For decades, Iris has accelerated the digital transformation journeys of major global and Canadian banks and financial services and payments enterprises.
Learn from Suneela and Pallavi how our solutions in AI / ML, Application Modernization, Automation, Cloud, Data Science, DevOps, Enterprise Analytics, Integrations, and Quality Engineering improved clients’ data quality, reliability and scalability; platform and systems efficiency; user interfaces and experiences; insight extraction and decision-making; and regulatory compliance. Also note that Iris is PCIDSS 4.0-certified to ensure robust cyber security and compliance for clients involved in payment card processing or that store, process, or transmit cardholder data and/or sensitive authentication data.
For more information on the benefits of our future-ready solutions, visit Iris Software Banking and Financial Services. Read our Perspective Papers on navigating Digital Ledger Technology and the state of Central Bank Digital Currency for more insights.
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