FIS Improves Product Portfolio with Faster Performance at a Third of the Cost

FIS helps millions of people manage their money every day. If you access your bank account through a mobile app, have funds in a 401(k) or even have bought a sandwich with a credit card lately, you’ve most likely benefited from the technology offered by this financial services tech provider.

A driving force in fintech today, FIS serves 95% of the world’s leading banks and thousands of businesses, large and small, with software and solutions that help securely move money and grow investments all over the world. Its capital markets products are utilized by 90% of the largest private equity firms and most of the globe’s biggest insurance companies. These organizations, along with many others, rely on FIS and its asset management technology to process millions of transactions every day — with a staggering $40 trillion processed on its technology in 2022 alone. That’s equivalent to almost half of the world’s total value in stocks ($100 trillion) or 1.5x the gross domestic product (GDP) of the U.S. ($27 trillion in 2023). 

Given the relentless pace of change today, not to mention the proliferation of data and regulations, companies like FIS have no choice but to stay ahead of the curve. Looking at the company’s data strategy, FIS Senior Director for Enterprise Strategy Patrick Donohue saw that legacy systems could no longer support the scale, security and governance needed. So he sought a better solution, one that satisfied three important areas: cloud modernization (capitalizing on the cloud’s capacity and elasticity), data access (putting data to use) and innovation (applying emerging technology). 

Consider for a moment the amount of data that is created in capital markets all over the globe. Between trade execution prices, routing practices, orders and accounts, the industry generates around 60 billion records per day, which amounts to more than 21 petabytes of data daily. 

Now consider that each of those records is also subject to regulatory review — by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) in Europe or the Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission (SESC) in Asia. “The data volumes and processing demand for these compliance reviews and reports can be rather intense,” explains Nathan Call, Director of RegTech Solutions at FIS. “So the technology we use to build the compliance systems can really make or break them.”

That’s why FIS chose Snowflake to handle its soaring amounts of data at scale. By rearchitecting its capital markets platform on Snowflake, FIS has achieved higher performance, 33% cost savings (from licenses, maintenance and overhead), more stability and greater customer satisfaction for its products.

The first product that FIS rolled out using Snowflake technology in the capital markets data platform was the comprehensive Compliance Suite, aimed at helping financial institutions meet regulatory obligations from one central system — through branch surveillance, communications surveillance, anti-money laundering and regulatory reporting. 

To comply with various rules and regulations, financial institutions must review and report every order, route and trade that flows through their systems. In some cases, it’s up to the institutions to detect and prevent illicit activity; in others, they’re required to submit their data to a regulator, who then reviews and analyzes it. Either way, compliance ends up being a massive data lift. 

To simplify the process, FIS brought together multiple previous solutions into one platform built on Snowflake, resulting in immediate performance gains. “Our systems run faster on less hardware,” Call says. “And our severity 1 and 2 level incident count has dropped by 68%.”

Using less than 20% of the compute power, FIS saw execution speeds improve overall by 2.5 times, with some jobs running more than 20 times faster. The data loading process now runs seven times more quickly than it had on previous systems, and batch processing times for most clients has improved fivefold on Snowflake, notes Patty Mitchell, FIS Senior Vice President and Product Development Group Executive.

These various performance enhancements have translated into a faster, more stable product. “We process up to a billion transactions without issue,” Mitchell says.

What’s more, the improved system does not come across any concurrency issues, thanks to Snowflake’s near-unlimited scale, which ensures that one client’s batch processing never impacts the performance of another’s. And Snowflake’s built-in data sharing capabilities break down the restrictions of old systems. “Clients were previously limited by the daily extract structure,” Donohue says. “But by moving that over to Snowflake and leveraging data sharing, clients have direct access now to the data they need.”

The democratization of data has also allowed FIS to begin layering on innovation with improved analytics. For instance, the company recently launched the Climate Risk Financial Modeler, which aims to help businesses better assess, reduce and report their exposure to climate change risks, using environmental, social and governance data in Snowflake.

Looking ahead, FIS has many ambitious plans for its capital markets platform. Focusing on the data access aspect of Donohue's strategy, FIS is improving its treasury management system by doubling down on Snowflake’s data sharing capabilities. And teams across its capital markets division are working to build more native applications and advanced capabilities into the data platform. 

Now, armed with a solid data foundation and seamless, secure data access, FIS is looking to bring in more innovations with Snowflake. Within the compliance landscape alone, AI and machine learning can help mitigate false positive alerts, by training models on a feedback loop, or aid in anomaly detection. 

“That’s all about helping clients increase efficiency and expanding the value possibilities with all of that data inside of Snowflake,” Donohue says.