Northern Trust Adopts Cloud DevOps Framework

Northern Trust has adopted a cloud DevOps framework to allow it to more efficiently develop technologies, such as its recent front-office solutions for managing the investment lifecycle of family offices and endowments.

The technology was built in collaboration with an undisclosed start-up on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and has recently gone live with its first beta client. The firm leverages the scalability of the cloud and has the ability to spin up an environment in around 10 minutes. The adoption of the cloud framework enabled Northern Trust to go from product idea to market in nine months, a fraction of the time it took when using traditional development processes and architectures.

Speaking on the sidelines of Waters Europe in London, Joerg Guenther, CIO of Northern Trust, said the firm recruited a head of product and an external tech team to work alongside existing members of Northern Trust’s development team to build out the front-office product. The team of 20 used agile methodology to code incremental changes to the product and automate regression changes and rollbacks within the central virtual environment.

Using APIs, the product is integrated with Slack, where team members are notified of changes and can receive feedback loops. The new framework has enabled Northern Trust to cut bottom-line costs and significantly speed up its time to market.

“Compared to the traditional on-premise technologies you can [at times] get up to 80–85% lower total cost of ownership,” Guenther said. He added, however, that the savings differ from case to case.

Guenther said during a panel discussion at the event that while cloud DevOps is fast-tracking the product development, getting the go-ahead to invest in new tech is a continuous uphill battle for institutions.

Zombie Apocalypse

In financial firms, those who want to innovate and stay ahead of the tech curve can find themselves in combat with those who hold the purse strings. 

During the panel discussion, Guenther quipped that convincing senior executive stakeholders to push through a product can sometimes feel a bit like battling a zombie army.

“I think we have to fight for that, we have to protect the development operations,” he said. “It’s almost like the zombie apocalypse where zombies are trying to climb up the wall and we have to keep beating at them until the solution is done.”

He added that top-level executives have a responsibility to protect innovation and embrace an ecosystem that allows for creativity. Imposing red tape or restricting development can cause consistent delays, or worse, cause projects to completely die off. Rather, said Guenther, teams can develop a project first, which can later be adjusted to fit a firm’s compliance and operational framework.

Speaking on the sidelines, and with respect to Northern Trust’s new front-office offering, he told WatersTechnology, “If we had started that creative process with all of that red tape, it would have taken us five times as long and we may have never gone live. So we built the solution and then we fit it into the control framework from an operational standpoint.”