DTCC focuses its modernization efforts across different business areas, delivering resilient, reliable, and secure enterprise technology for both internal and external clients. In this Q&A with DTCC Connection, Anchal Gupta, DTCC Managing Director of Enterprise Products, Platform and Data Engineering, provides her thoughts on how her team supports DTCC in safeguarding and shaping the financial markets.
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DC:How is your team harnessing innovative technologies and concepts to respond to our clients’ needs?
AG: DTCC is in the midst of reimagining technology and processes to respond to the industry’s most complex operational challenges. As part of this journey, our group is tasked with creating new foundational capabilities and opportunities for automation, process simplification, and strategic platform enhancements.
A few examples include:
- Rethinking how our clients connect to DTCC and making it faster and easier for them to get what they need, through capabilities like cloud data warehouses and optimized user interfaces that provide dynamic operational support;
- Enhancing our suite of DevSecOps tools to automate security scans that provide greater protection against increasing cyber threats;
- Strategically increasing our public cloud footprint based on best-fit business cases and evolving regulatory requirements;
- Making our applications portable across different platforms using container technology; and
- Reducing time-to-market by using capacity-on-demand capabilities that scale up infrastructure processing power to rapidly respond to market volatility.
DC:You’re modernizing the platforms that our most critical products and services run on. What is the strategy behind these efforts and what are the benefits to clients?
AG: Our multi-platform strategy includes a balanced approach across public cloud, private cloud, and the mainframe, enabling DTCC to remain nimble based on industry demand. In recent years, there has been a lot of focus on public cloud, but the mainframe and other classic infrastructure remain critically important to our daily operations and transactional processing. These platforms have been especially important as we have navigated significant market volatility since 2020.
We value each platform’s unique set of capabilities and benefits, and we consider many factors, including regulatory requirements, when determining which platform is best fit for a specific business case. Our platforms at DTCC inherently have auto-scaling capabilities, which enable us to dynamically increase or decrease our computing resources. This provides optionality and flexibility, as our teams shift workloads to the most appropriate platform that offers clients the best performance.
My group continues to mature our Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning capabilities, with recent wins in the data space that we will continue to build on. Additionally, we remain focused on taking a holistic approach to automating IT processes, leveraging reusable capabilities that enhance our risk and security posture while improving time-to-market.
Related: Utilizing Technology to Handle Market Volatility
DC: DTCC stands at the center of global trading activity. How is your team strengthening security and reducing risk associated with IT infrastructure as they modernize our systems and platforms?
AG: I think of DTCC as the risk manager for the industry and over the past several years we have made significant investments to modernize our systems and platforms. We have expanded to public and private cloud, upgraded our mainframe infrastructure, introduced modern data ingestion and movement capabilities along with API interfaces for our clients. These capabilities have come together to enhance the resilience, security, and stability of our infrastructure at DTCC. But we aren’t done yet – and we continue to look for ways leverage emerging technologies that elevate our infrastructure and continue to advance our modernization goals.
At each step, we are closely partnered with DTCC business areas, with five key focus areas at top of mind: strengthening our risk management capabilities, improving security posture and product quality, making sure everything we do is reflective of our commitment to clients, and fostering a culture that prioritizes automation and reusability.
DC: As we look toward the future, what are the trends and long-term opportunities for infrastructure at DTCC and the financial services industry?
AG: Secure, resilient products and services are table stakes for financial services organizations. Over the past decade, infrastructure modernization has come a long way, and we see varying degrees of maturity across the industry. Regulatory requirements around the globe continue to increase and evolve, introducing new challenges and opportunities. Organizations have to remain nimble and agile in their modernization approaches. As I look ahead, some key future trends in technology will continue to be automation and enabling technology capabilities to be delivered ‘as a service’.
At DTCC, we have well-defined infrastructure and a modern platform strategy. We have automated delivery processes in place, and we have matured our public and private Cloud computing capabilities. In IT, we remain focused on advancing our Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service capabilities to continue improving time-to-market and reducing risk. Our objective is to have consumable APIs that enable these capabilities, as we continue to increase our network capacities and the software underpinning it. We’re always looking to leverage opportunities such as DevSecOps as part of our ‘shift-left’ mindset, helping DTCC embed secure and resilient capabilities early on in our project delivery. All of this is critical as we continue to navigate increasing cyber threats and stand at the forefront of protecting our clients and the industry from these vulnerabilities.