Upgrading IT Systems to Streamline EuroPoint's Financial Services and Enhance the Customer Experiences

With more than 15 years of market experience, Serbian Financial Technology (FinTech) enterprise EuroPoint has built an extensive business, forging key partner relationships both in its Southeastern Europe (SEE) home region and further afield, across the world. The company provides financial, commodity, and business information, reporting on global markets and the world's leading exchanges, rapidly relaying data from stock exchanges and news and trading platforms to its clients. In terms of products, it offers an all-inclusive market display service monitoring financial markets, an online trading platform for a wide range of financial products, money transaction services, and an interbank trading system, among others. EuroPoint is, to date, the first and only company in the SEE region to develop a web trading application — QuoteStation — that monitors all SEE stock exchanges in real-time.

Emerging Need for New, Competitive Service Offerings to Meet FinTech Industry Trends

The vast majority of financial institutions around the world now find themselves having to rapidly adapt to emerging technologies. From securities processing agents and investment advisors to wealth, risk, and asset managers, all can streamline their financial strategies by using user-friendly services that provide optimal support for investment decisions, real-time trade reporting information, and immediate money transactions. EuroPoint's team is fully dedicated to developing financial applications just like this for brokerage houses, banks, financial institutions, and retail clients. In addition, the company is also contributing to the growing, pandemic-driven trend for digital payment services and it plans to offer online bill payment services soon. This will allow customers to pay their bills securely and quickly, eliminating waiting times and the need to stand around in physical queues.

To maintain its competitive edge and ensure the ongoing development of new services, EuroPoint realized that it needed a more sophisticated Information Technology (IT) platform. Indeed, IT infrastructure is cast in the critical role of maintaining the stability of EuroPoint's daily operations. Such infrastructure not only runs the applications that process transactions, it also stores a vast amount of data, as well as supporting the analytical tools that serve customers in real-time. Of course, reliability is absolutely key here, with any downtime, no matter how short, immediately and negatively impacting the quality of services delivered to end-customers.

EuroPoint's legacy storage was simply not up to the task, unable to support the development of new applications nor sustain the data-hungry workloads that support the customer experience and analytics.

Building the IT Infrastructure of Tomorrow

To address its very pressing challenges, EuroPoint decided to upgrade its IT infrastructure. The starting point had to be an ultra-fast, easy-to-operate storage system that had the ability to achieve far superior levels of data latency as well as scale data securely. Such a high-performance storage system promised to accelerate transaction speeds and guarantee responsiveness, supporting efficiency.

As it is for most companies, data migration to new devices was a key and very real concern for EuroPoint. Data migration projects, of course, impact customer business data, applications, and systems. The company wanted to find a vendor with the ability to carefully plan the migration process, minimize unforeseen costs and unplanned downtime, and ensure that end-users would not be inconvenienced. And while there were many contenders available on the market, only Huawei's solution capabilities met the technology requirements of EuroPoint's business continuity plan. Indeed, Huawei could — and can — offer higher storage speeds with minimal latency, bundled with the technical expertise and support from trusted partners so critical to a project like this.

With an innovative hardware platform, FlashLink intelligent algorithms, and End to End (E2E) Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe) architecture, Huawei OceanStor Dorado 3000 offers latency as low as 0.05 ms and can easily handle concurrent transactions of tens of millions of users.

OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage was also chosen for its ability to effectively prevent any service interruptions, offering fault detection systems that allow services to always remain unaffected, with no waiting time during system upgrades. With a range of intelligent software features, 93% of problems can be proactively identified and fixed before they occur.

OceanStor Dorado uses E2E reliability architecture at the component, architecture, product, solution, and cloud levels to meet requirements in full integration scenarios and ensure 99.9999% service availability. The solution also satisfies the data-hungry storage requirements of large databases, particularly in the Financial Services Industry (FSI).

EuroPoint has also implemented a FusionServer Pro Rack Server that delivers superior performance and excellent scalability while improving data center space utilization. For the project, system implementation and data migration both went smoothly without any interruptions to customer services. With Huawei and its local partner performing the main work during weekends, when data traffic is reduced, the project was completed in less than two weeks, with zero downtime to services. "Huawei's partner's storage and server virtualization product knowledge, as well as its experience with data migration gave us a lot of confidence and was a big relief," Niko Cuca from Europoint said.

Everything Is Faster when Financial Data Is Connected

Now, with its updated storage system in operation, EuroPoint has achieved its goals of improving application latency in addition to simplified maintenance and smooth data migration. The data availability index has been significantly improved, assuring stable business processes with zero interruptions. While the highest level of reliability and availability of customer data — anytime, anywhere — supports the rapid growth of digital services, Huawei's solution has increased system performance and reduced application latency.

EuroPoint's IT upgrade has also directly impacted the satisfaction of end-users, ultimately helping it attract more customers: the financial services the company offers are now more accessible than ever before, with transactions that are far faster. EuroPoint customers have enjoyed — and acknowledged — a 50% increase in speed and responsiveness for the company's application systems and platforms. Such a dramatic improvement has been a big boost to EuroPoint's word of mouth, with more and more users recommending its products and services, adding significant value to the business.

With EuroPoint offering real-time services to customers, driving incremental revenue, the decisive action taken, updating its IT infrastructure wholesale, appears to have been the correct one. EuroPoint is now well-positioned to emerge in a winning market position as it competes across borders. But the company isn't resting there: it continues to look for ways to improve, making smart infrastructure updates and investments, embracing digital transformation along the way.