Strategic Consulting Engagement for a Global Custodian: Delivered an Architecture Blueprint to Drive Transformation

Client

A leading global financial institution operating in over 60 markets and six continents. It offers a suite of financial services, including retail banking, corporate banking, investment services, and global custody and clearing solutions.

Challenges

The client faced significant challenges across its markets due to fragmented custody platforms, manual trade workflows, and a lack of real-time insights due to siloed data systems. These operational challenges hindered their ability to deliver centralized and standardized operations, meet regulatory demands, and provide actionable insights for strategic decision-making. Heightened client expectations for seamless, real-time, self-service services and increased competition from fintech disruptors added to the complexities. 

A large operations team that supported multiple geographies was needed to maintain the high levels of manual trade instruction repairs. The use of multiple instances of custody platforms for different markets resulted in varying custody client experiences and increased rework when building common features. Further, the client had limited transparency across the custody settlement transaction lifecycle.

LTM Solution

LTM provided consulting services in designing a comprehensive architecture & transformation roadmap. Key aspects of the solution included the following:

• Cloud-Native Architecture : Engaged our Business & Technology Consulting team, which brought deep custody domain expertise along with industry experience in helping clients transform from legacy to cloud-native architecture.
• Domain-Driven Design Principles : Executed the consulting assignment over a period of 5 months to deliver a comprehensive architecture blueprint using domain-driven design principles that will help the bank’s business and IT stakeholders to align on future state platforms.
• Global Custody-Direct Custody and Clearing : Conducted in-person event storming sessions with the Product team and proposed a single transaction model for GC-DCC (Global Custody-Direct Custody and Clearing) transactions and new cash management processes working with the Treasury team.
• API and Real-Time Events : Designed a next-generation client communication journey with API and real-time events. Redesigned the exception management flow to increase straight-through processing.
• Future State Architecture : Provided a product roadmap and future state architecture, including microservices catalog, business events, datasets, and non-functional requirements for a couple of complex markets.

Business Benefits

LTM’s solutions resulted in measurable improvements for the client’s custody operations and customer experience, including the following outcomes:

• Developed an architecture blueprint that helps the bank reduce its operations queues by 50% by leveraging straight through processing.
• Remove duplicate IT systems across markets, potentially reducing infrastructure costs by 40%
• Provided best practices & recommendations on building cloud-native patterns
• Modelled new customer journeys for a rich client experience
• Improved client competitiveness in the custody processing market
• Helped the bank move in an incremental manner from the current state to the target state.

Conclusion

By leveraging advanced technology and a robust strategy, LTM transformed the client’s custody operations, aligning them with modern-day expectations of data analytics in banking and streamlined automation. This transformation enabled scalable, resilient, and globally consistent performance, empowering the bank to remain competitive in a fast-evolving financial services industry.

With ongoing collaborations and an unwavering commitment to innovation, this partnership continues to unlock potential for long-term growth while addressing emerging market needs tied to regulatory, technological, and operational advancements.