EFG Hermes trades 160 times faster with revamped Direct Market Access platform based on Microsoft Azure

Over the last four decades, EFG Hermes has firmly established itself as the leading investment bank franchise in FEM. The firm covers 75 capital markets in the Middle East, Asia, and North and Sub-Saharan Africa. One of its key business areas is direct market access/low-touch trading, a method of adding transactions directly to the exchange orders book that’s becoming increasingly popular among institutional traders.

As part of a global digital transformation journey, the company  launched a state-of-the-art Direct Market Access (DMA) platform built on Microsoft Azure to support the firm’s brokerage division in ensuring swift trade executions. The new platform has reduced latency in the system, helped get bids in faster than ever, and saved the company time and money.

Information in milliseconds

Since day one, EFG Hermes has worked to maximize value for its stakeholders via innovative financial products and services. “Our customers are always at the heart of what we do,” says Mohamed Fathy, Chief Information Officer (CIO) at EFG Hermes.

“The new Direct Market Access (DMA) platform is 160 times faster than our legacy system,” says Mohamed Fathy, Chief Information Officer (CIO) at EFG Hermes.  “Since the launch, we have seen a 45-percent increase in the turnover of DMA trading orders, having gone from previously completing 50 orders per second to now processing an outstanding 8,000 orders per second.”

To accomplish this, Fathy and his team worked closely with Microsoft to optimize the new DMA platform. “We were confident that through our partnership with Microsoft, we would be able to establish a secure platform to fuel our cloud transformation, so that we could harness the full potential of cloud technology to optimize operations and enhance productivity,” he explains.

The process included fine-tuning the infrastructure and the code to reduce the time lag between order submission and order fulfillment. The new platform is also geographically distributed over many cloud locations and connected through Azure ExpressRoute for additional speed. Hence, Azure Active Directory Seamless Single Sign-On streamlined the process since employees no longer waste time logging into devices multiple times.

The boost in speed enables EFG Hermes’ institutional clients to seize extremely fleeting trading opportunities. The company’s international clients also experience less network latency when executing orders for regional exchanges. “We've reduced our network latency by 70 to 80 percent so our clients can capture trading opportunities and execute transactions immediately. We now measure our latency in two-digit milliseconds,” explains Fathy. “We were also able to introduce advanced trading strategies such as Algorithmic trading, an automated trading option that is faster and more efficient than human traders.”

Developing and scaling faster than ever

Fathy is a strong advocate of leveraging technology to amplify efficiency. “There’s been a tremendous transformation in the financial services industry driven by technology,” he explains. “It would enable us to gain a competitive advantage by improving business agility, optimizing costs, and driving efficiency.”

Fathy wanted to ensure that his team could easily develop and maintain the new system. “Azure DevOps empowered the team to build the platform much faster since it enabled us to automate the integration and deployment processes,” he explains. The team can now plan, track progress, collaborate on developing and deploying code, and measure performance more effectively and efficiently. Since the team can work faster, scaling the system now takes five minutes instead of two or three months.

According to Fathy, this is just the start of EFG Hermes’ digital transformation. The next step is modernizing everything else. “We look forward to further build on our partnership with Microsoft by moving all our applications onto Azure,” he says. “This will allow us to gain insights that position us as an agile, full-fledged, data-driven organization, and further enrich our digital brokerage capacities in line with global standards.”