Why do ambitious firms need a top-priority trading-platform health check?

What if your complex, business-critical, heavily customized, black box of a trading platform was actually working against you? Wouldn’t you want to know right away, and find out how to bring it back in line?

Sure, but there’s always that doubt: Why risk disrupting the fragile operational stability any more than you have to? After all, “The platform’s working alright, isn’t it… more or less?”

In truth, legacy code and external contractors are unduly expensive to maintain. Platforms frequently suffer from production issues, regressions and outages. And, frustratingly, department heads have to contend with poor auditability and data visibility.

Clear insight is non-negotiable

Leaving issues like these unresolved just leads to greater risks, vulnerabilities and Q4 disappointments over time. The visibility gap leads to:

• Increased operational risk: A single outage could impact trading, compliance and client trust.
• Transformation paralysis: Modernization initiatives get delayed, not because leadership lacks ambition, but because the foundation is too uncertain to build upon.
• Spiraling costs: More resources are spent on firefighting than on innovation.
• Competitive disadvantage: Fintechs and modern banks move faster, launch quicker and scale more efficiently.
• Regulatory exposure: When access controls, data lineage and exception handling are unclear, passing audits becomes more challenging and expensive.
• Inefficiency: Support teams are often stuck in reactive mode, frequently duplicating effort across legacy and parallel platforms.

Business forecasts may say growth, but the firm is flying blind, unable to prioritize or justify change.

Without a clear understanding of its operational health and the implementation of future-proof measures, how can anyone be certain that the platform will support the firm’s ambitions? Is it scalable enough? Can it seamlessly integrate with AI, cloud and modern regulatory systems?

Trading platform health checks are not major projects or audits. They’re concise, expert-led diagnostics designed to bring clarity, confidence and control to specific issues and opportunities. In addition to assessing levels of future-proofing, there are two further examples and the questions they address: Is the production support team up to scratch? Ready for cloud lift off?

Is the production support team up to scratch?

Do firms have the right skills, teams and operating procedures to get maximum value from your platform?

• How experienced is the current production support team?
• Do team members resolve issues on time?
• Are long-term improvements being implemented?
• In the case of multiple platforms covering front to back office, are production support teams mutualized or managed separately (increasing costs)?
• Is the configuration clean or highly customized (more regressions and production issues)?

Ready for cloud lift off?

Ensure the organization is fully prepared to launch a cloud migration initiative:

• Does the firm have the right architecture in place?
• Are its processes correctly aligned to maximize cloud value?
• Is there sufficient visibility on storage and compute (pricing) consumption?
• Does it have a multicloud strategy in place to ensure business continuity?
• Would it be beneficial to adopt a full as-a-service cloud model?

Pulling it all together

Drawing on DXC’s vast experience across products, platforms and operations, here are some final  thoughts.

Align platform health checks with vendors and product strategies to ensure insights and proposals support business objectives. Commercial flexibility — a key strength — underpins all DXC health checks:

• Fixed price, fast start
• Investment is discountable against future work
• Joint innovation and volume discount funds

Our clients receive a written report detailing findings, risks, opportunities and quick wins, which is presented during a structured walkthrough with stakeholders. No major configuration access is needed, and there’s no vendor lock-in. Just clarity and common sense.

Here’s how DXC’s trading platform health checks are helping some of the industry’s most influential organizations:

Global financial group: Met different needs in Asia (defining the TOM for replacing a legacy platform), the UK (KYC unification processes across the UK and Europe) and the United States (future-proofing the Murex platform following a production outage).

World-leading bank: The bank’s risk platform is currently hosted on Azure, and it’s considering implementing a second AWS landing zone to establish a multicloud setup.

Global bank with a strong European base: The development of the bank’s internal pricing platform (IPA) by 120 developers has been ongoing for 9 years. It’s getting out of control with an increasing number of regressions. DXC delivered a 2-month (now extended) health check to establish industrialized testing and DevOps processes.

European asset servicing banking group: CIO complained of spending most Mondays dealing with weekend production issues on the bank’s legacy platform (UBIX). We’re conducting a review of the Dynatrace monitoring framework to make it predictive rather than reactive.

Leading asset management company: The firm is signing a large client in Japan and, as this is its first engagement in the region, leaders are understandably cautious. DXC is helping them assess their platform readiness in accordance with Japanese regulations and working practices.

A trading platform health check clears the way forward. It’s simple, fast and focused on what matters most.