3 engagements, in detail

Context

This group moves tens of thousands of containers around the world every day. Customs authorities, port authorities, carriers, suppliers, customers and the vessels themselves all exchange structured data with the group's systems, continuously and in several formats. Those flows are the nervous system of the operation rather than a back-office concern.

The relationship began in 2013. In 2017, faced with high-cadence EDIFACT exchange requirements, we designed and deployed a custom enterprise service bus as the backbone of the group's data integration. 10 years later it carries close to 2 million exchanges a day and remains the reference architecture, with no major rewrite of its technical core.

What made it hard

• High-cadence EDIFACT from day one9 messages per second required at launch, through a database to XML to EDIFACT chain, with a wide variety of formats and message-specific business rules.
• Designing for volumes nobody had specified yetThe architecture had to absorb a rise from 9 messages per second to 2 million daily exchanges over 10 years, along with new formats and business uses that did not exist at design time, without touching the application core.
• Continuity in a 24/7 critical environmentMaritime freight runs continuously. The platform tolerates no interruption, which sets the bar for both stability and resilience.
• A fully remote team, for 10 yearsContinuity, knowledge transfer and the absence of any single point of failure had to be engineered into the team as deliberately as into the platform.

Context

This asset manager runs multi-asset portfolios on international financial markets and handles time-critical transaction flows. Its SWIFT team is composed entirely of our consultants and is the entry and exit point for every financial flow in the business: everything that comes in and goes out passes through it.

The client has functional analysts in house but no technical analysts, so the team naturally extended its remit to that role as well, translating between the business — finance, trading, middle office — and what the integration systems actually do.

What made it hard

• Market cut-offs, and zero toleranceMarket hours are not negotiable. At precise points in the day, orders must be transmitted. An incident still open at the cut-off has direct financial consequences, so support has to be immediate and final.
• Two roles in one teamWith no technical analysts on the client side, the team bridges business need and technical implementation as well as building and running the flows.
• The annual SWIFT November releaseEvery November brings format updates tied to new taxes, regulations and international standards. Every affected message has to be re-analysed, updated and retested. Some years that is transparent; some years it is a project.
• Around 600 conversion mappingsThe mapping estate covers routing, filtering and transformation. Every version migration means recompiling and retesting the whole set, which is a project in its own right each time.