INTRODUCTION
Encrypted messaging for the financial services industry
The rise of digital communication platforms has been a game changer for many companies. But what about the heavily regulated financial services industry? Visibility of communications between colleagues and customers is vital for delivering a great, seamless customer experience and supporting collaboration, but people need assurance that their data is private and secure. This puts companies under pressure to keep comprehensive records in compliance with strict regulations and to make sure access to data is properly controlled.
Founded in 2014, Symphony is a collaboration platform that caters to the unique needs of the financial services sector. With more than half a million customers, it’s the world’s largest collaboration platform for financial organizations, trusted by the top ten global investment banks to handle their customer communications.
Users at financial institutions can send real-time encrypted messages, open group chats, engage in rich content sharing, and use bots developed using Symphony APIs to automate workflows. It also integrates with popular messaging solutions such as WhatsApp, which enables banks to communicate with customers on their preferred channel via a secure, encrypted platform.
A key feature of the Symphony platform is its audit trail capabilities. “Banks need access to information dating back months or years to comply with annual audits or when they’re investigating actions and activities. Our platform keeps all that data secure with the assurance that nothing can be edited or lost,” explained Olivier Richaud, Vice President of Technical Platforms and SRE at Symphony.
THE CHALLENGE
Simplifying and modernizing database architecture
As you’d expect from a world-leading solution, the Symphony platform manages a large set of confidential and critical data.
“Our platform is mission critical for customers. We need to ensure high levels of operational efficiency and performance,” said Mr. Richaud. “We also wanted to achieve that by moving to a managed service, which would free the team up to focus on more valuable activities.”
To achieve that at scale, the company needed to simplify and modernize its architecture. It also wanted to build a more robust, high performing platform and take advantage of automation, which would support business growth. Symphony focused on automation to improve self-healing capabilities, simplify platform scalability, and resilience.
“All of our applications have been containerized and we were able to create a completely automated platform on a cloud infrastructure that supports DevOps and the implementation of well-defined services,” said Mr. Richaud. “We can now focus on development and less on operational maintenance and patching.”
As part of its platform evolution, Symphony evaluated its audit trail functionality. Audit trails keep track of all user interactions, which helps to ensure compliance. Symphony initially supported audit trail search with dedicated Elasticsearch clusters that it had to operate internally. Indexing was growing beyond billions of entries, with performance requirements forcing Symphony to overprovision to deal with peak time performance, thus incurring rising costs.
THE SOLUTION
Migrating to a secure, fully managed database platform
After evaluating the solutions on the market, the team decided to transition from Elasticsearch to MongoDB Atlas and MongoDB Atlas Search. At the core of Symphony’s platform strategy was selecting key technology vendors, Google Cloud and MongoDB.
“As a long-term MongoDB customer, we decided to shift to MongoDB Atlas because of its higher SLAs, enhanced performance, and better cost control,” explained Mr. Richaud. “Rolling out Atlas Search was a natural evolution, combining all the benefits of MongoDB with the capability to simplify our technology stack without sacrificing functionality.”
The company renewed its MongoDB Atlas subscription through the Google Cloud Marketplace because of its pay-as-you-go, simplified subscription experience.
Symphony successfully migrated its tier one customer data into MongoDB Atlas. “MongoDB makes it easy to provision and redeploy data in that environment,” added Mr. Richaud. “APIs and integration with key operational tooling like Terraform have also reduced implementation times and reinforced the ability to offer repeatable operations.”
MongoDB Consulting provided support and a dedicated technical account manager, while staff used MongoDB University training to upskill in parallel with the implementation. “The support we received from the team at MongoDB is among the best support we’ve ever had. It helped ensure high levels of operational efficiency and streamlined the adoption,” Mr. Richaud commented.
Alongside observability vendors Datadog and Splunk, MongoDB Atlas is integrated with the company’s observability solution to provide visibility and monitoring over the environment. Together, these solutions provide Symphony with a low-maintenance, highly efficient, and robust platform underpinning its core service.
To help customers find information using the audit trail feature, the team rolled out MongoDB Atlas Search, which is more scalable than the previous solution. Symphony completed the migration of its tier four customers in late 2022, with subsequent tiers scheduled for migration throughout 2023. The Symphony audit trail search UI has rich features and filters to help customers find the right data quickly. This requires high flexibility of the underlying indexing and search solution, which is now backed by Atlas Search. At the same time, the technical stack was simplified with direct impact on operational efficiency and cost reduction.
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