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July 12, 2024

ClearBank processes 20 million payments a month—up from 8,000—with platform built on Azure

ClearBank has grown significantly since launching in 2017. To continue scaling up, it needed to rapidly grow within the cloud and develop a resilient competitive platform to process payments. Overcoming regulatory concerns about cloud security, ClearBank moved its services to Microsoft Azure Service Fabric and App Service Environment. It added other Azure products and Microsoft Security solutions to help protect and enhance the platform. With its move to Azure, ClearBank gained both scalability and efficiency. It now pushes out 183% more monthly system releases and has a robust, reliable platform to support the latest banking products and services for financial institutions.

ClearBank

“We’ve maintained five times more uptime than last year and 100 percent uptime this year, which we wouldn’t have been able to do if we had just been running in a single zone without the architecture we’ve created alongside Microsoft”

Tom Harris, Chief Technology Officer, ClearBank

A clear vision for growth with Azure 

As the newest clearing bank in the United Kingdom in 250 years, ClearBank helps financial technology companies quickly and easily access cutting-edge financial products and services like agency banking and embedded banking. Connecting directly to the United Kingdom’s banking and payment infrastructure, the full-service firm is helping to lead an industry shift. It’s regularly rolling out more banking services and transactional solutions, including wealth management products, on its platform to augment a competitive operating model built using new technologies and an API-first approach.

Since receiving its banking license in 2017, ClearBank has ramped up volume and expanded its team from 100 to 800 employees supporting the firm’s rapid growth, including the more than 600 releases pushed to its system every month during working hours. “In 2018, we struggled to process 8,000 payments a month, and now we handle about 20 million payments a month,” says Tom Harris, Chief Technology Officer at ClearBank. “These are quite impressive stats for a regulated bank.” 

Wanting to sustain and further accelerate its growth, ClearBank started to evaluate its infrastructure soon after launch, driven by the hope of improving resilience and scalability. “Running workloads on-premises can be expensive and painful, and we didn’t want that,” says Bernard Wright, Chief Information Security Officer at ClearBank. “Once we could start moving things to the cloud, we wouldn’t have to worry about scaling physical hardware, and that became a big driver. We wanted a technology provider like Microsoft to take care of that so we could focus on what we do best.”

ClearBank’s founding team had existing relationships with Microsoft, which influenced the team’s decision to move to Microsoft Azure. First, it had to sway regulators and other stakeholders that a shift to the Azure cloud platform was not only the right decision but a safe one. “We wanted to be Azure based when we launched, and we started to put a few things up there, but our regulator had lots of questions and concerns,” recalls Wright. “If you think back to eight years ago, often people’s first reaction was, ‘The cloud’s not secure.’ So, a lot of education was needed, not just for United Kingdom regulators but also the payment scheme operators.”

ClearBank chose Azure Service Fabric as its container orchestrator and hosted its application workflows using App Service Environment—an Azure App Service feature that provides fully isolated, dedicated environments. “With this approach, we were still using Microsoft technology on-premises and moved services and workloads to Azure once we showed the regulator how secure the environments are,” says Wright.

The firm transitioned from Azure Service Fabric to a modular, microservices architecture, introducing Azure API Management. As part of this shift, ClearBank created individual deployable units that communicate via Azure Service Bus. ClearBank now allocates more than 25% of its infrastructure to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). It has also consolidated its SQL databases on Azure into a single instance, which it’s gradually breaking down into smaller SQL databases. Furthermore, Azure Cosmos DB serves as the core transactional database for its accounts and settlement processes.

ClearBank protects its platform using a combination of Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Defender, Azure Web Application Firewall, Microsoft Entra, and most recently Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention and Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management. “The rate of product growth in Microsoft aligns with our growth journey, and we’re trending together as true partners,” says Harris. “There’s clear investment from Microsoft in security, resilience, and what regulators are asking of us.” 

Attracting financial institutions with a reliable, digital-first experience 

ClearBank facilitates a starter-friendly, digital-first experience for other financial institutions. The firm brings them the technical capabilities that they need so they can focus on increasing and supporting their customer base rather than developing proprietary payment solutions. “What attracts customers is that they can access systems like Faster Payments and CHAPS without worrying about connectivity in the background or the auditing that goes with it,” explains Wright. “Customers just connect to a ClearBank API, tell us what they want access to, and leave the hard parts to us while they focus on their clients.” 

To ensure it can maintain its success and support new customers as they’re brought onboard, ClearBank invests in automation with Azure Databricks and Microsoft Power Platform. It also strives to adopt strategies and processes aligned with its zero downtime goals. “We release updates to our platform around the clock without being limited to scheduled windows. To ensure reliability, we use Microsoft multizone architecture,” says Wright. “This has proven effective during outages or issues experienced by other banks, and we’ve continued operating seamlessly.”

ClearBank’s developer community has started using Application Insights, a feature of Azure Monitor, to optimize its mean time to recovery. “We aim for around 30 minutes from discovery of an incident to recovery, and we can largely achieve that goal using Application Insights to get immediate alerting prompts from our systems and diagnose them accurately and quickly,” says Harris. 

To further support its efforts to respond to issues promptly and continually evolve its platform, the firm deploys infrastructure and applications using Azure DevOps and HashiCorp Terraform on Azure together with the Git workflow in DevOps so releases can be repeated or rolled back as necessary. “We make more than 600 changes a month because we have this repeatable deployment capability,” says Harris. “Using Azure DevOps tools over the last year, we increased our number of releases by 183% while only increasing our team by 63%, and we’re able to get 25% of our changes done within one day.”

Speeding up production timelines and payment processing without refactoring 

ClearBank has enjoyed full support from Microsoft product teams from day one, especially as Microsoft introduces new offerings. The firm’s timeline from discovering new capabilities to using them in production has dropped from months to days or weeks, despite working in an industry traditionally rife with long and complex proposal processes. “Microsoft architects regularly help us navigate what our architecture should look like, what services to use, and most importantly, how to design our applications to best fit the cloud and event-based infrastructure and tiering,” says Harris. 

Compared to competitors that may rely on batch processing, ClearBank can do real-time processing with its API and gateway. As a result, the firm processes 99% of all payments within its service level objectives, including processing Faster Payments transactions in less than 10 seconds. “We actually process most of our payments in less than 3 seconds, which is a key part of our scalability,” says Harris.

Better yet, it’s achieved all this without major platform refactoring. “We’ve gone from having issues in the early days, when we processed 8,000 transactions in a month, to now doing 20 million payments without issues, and our architecture hasn’t materially changed,” adds Harris. “We’ve never rewritten our platform. We’ve merely evolved the platform, which is a massive advantage when you’re trying to build lots of new products.” In fact, ClearBank recently launched an entirely new product within four weeks—a significant achievement for a regulated business.

Simplifying tasks, achieving 100% uptime, and remaining competitive 

ClearBank’s Azure environment is every technology leader’s dream. The ease of use gives the firm’s large development team the ability and autonomy to independently manage infrastructure without dependencies on centralized infrastructure teams. “For deployment, monitoring, and alerting, we don’t have to worry about complicating tasks with multiple tool sets,” adds Wright. 

As it continues to tailor its business model with new and additional Azure solutions, ClearBank has grown into a cloud-first clearing bank that’s changed attitudes among regulators and stakeholders, and it’s developed a high level of expertise. “By working with Microsoft, we provide the most secure, reliable, performant, and scalable platform that we can,” says Harris. “We’ve maintained five times more uptime than last year and 100% uptime this year, which we wouldn’t have been able to do if we had just been running in a single zone without the architecture we’ve created alongside Microsoft.”

ClearBank is now exploring Azure AI services and GPT-4.5 use cases around the firm’s data offerings, augmenting its Microsoft 365 E5 suite with Copilot for Microsoft 365. This will be critical as ClearBank expands into European and US markets as part of its global strategy. “We were born in the Microsoft Cloud, and now we want to create AI foundations so we can scale, remain competitive, resolve issues faster than competitors, and make this technology part of the overall experience,” concludes Harris. “We’re fully engaged and aligned with Microsoft in our commitment to the future.” 

Find out more about ClearBank on X/Twitter and LinkedIn.

“We release updates to our platform around the clock without being limited to scheduled windows. To ensure reliability, we use Microsoft multizone architecture. This has proven effective during outages or issues experienced by other banks, and we’ve continued operating seamlessly.”

Bernard Wright, Chief Information Security Officer, ClearBank

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