Bluestone engaged SXiQ to modernise their infrastructure platform into cloud micro-services architecture to provide the foundation for exponential growth.

“Through an innovative Cloud & Micro-services strategy, SXiQ have reduced our risk, created a secure, scalable & sustainable platform for us to achieve our business growth targets.”

Phil Gray, CIO, Bluestone APAC

SXiQ has implemented modern DevOps processes, a Microsoft Azure based integration platform, with micro-services and infrastructure-as-code so that fast-growing business can run their new banking platform effectively.

Background

Bluestone is a fast-growing Australian business bank, specialising in sub-prime residential home loans. In 2020 Bluestone decided to enter a new market requiring them to grow their business by 1000% within 5 years.

The core banking system could not cope with their anticipated growth in transaction volume. To make matters worse, if the Origination platform crashed, the Servicing and Collections would crash too, creating issues across the business.

Bluestone needed a partner who could help them de-couple their business systems and enable them to scale the business ahead of demand.

The Challenge

• Core banking system unstable and not able to cope with growth aspirations of the business & not stable.
• Loan origination platform did not have capacity to process expected level of requests.
• Core Banking & Origination Systems tightly coupled presenting a high risk to  keep up with demand due to settlement, servicing & collections.

The core banking platform was fragmented across three legacy instances of the same loan management platform, and the IT delivery model was based on traditional on-premise infrastructure.  A single environment took months to deploy.

As a result:

1. IT systems were not able to keep to cope with forecasted growth.
2. IT was not agile enough to keep up with the business’ innovation agenda
3. Any system changes presented significant risk and  potential outage impacts to the business

The Solution

• Microsoft Azure Integration Platform enables scalability, stability & security.
• Micro-Services Strategy enables separation of business processes for ongoing stability.
• API Platform enables business to source loan applications from digital providers at any scale.
• Modern DevOps processes on Microsoft Azure provides agility in a modern cloud infrastructure.

SXiQ worked with the Business’ IT to develop a modern micro-services platform for the four major processes needed to run a loan-book: origination, settlement, servicing and collections with intelligent micro-segmentation zones in order to create resilience across core business applications.

The platform leverages the Microsoft Azure Integration Services framework.  The framework consists of API management, orchestration, messaging and events.
SXiQ implemented a modern DevOps process, leveraging CICD pipelines, DevOps toolsets and infrastructure-as-code.  This enabled the Business’ IT team to deploy environments for development and testing in hours rather than months, in a highly repeatable and consistent manner.

The Results

• IT Platform Scalability to meet and exceed aggressive business growth goals.
• Enhanced Innovation enabled by IT platform agility and modern DevOps processes.
• Improved Security from leveraging industry best-practices and a modern hyper-scale cloud provider.
• Stable & Resilient Platform by implementing a stable platform; meaning that if systems supporting one business units fail, other business units can keep operating.

The range of solutions implemented by SXiQ, has provided this fast-growing business Bank with the IT foundation to successfully scale its business operations to achieve its aggressive growth targets.

• Significantly reduced risk due to separation of business processes.
• Secure, stable & scalable Integration Platform to allow for the increase in mortgage applications from external digital providers.
• Sustainable ongoing DevOps processes & infrastructure as code for business to develop and test their new platform rapidly & productively.
• Business benefits from being able to rapidly create infrastructure, platforms and code as they need it due to all dev and test workloads now running in Microsoft Azure cloud.

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