Founded over two centuries ago, Barclays is a global financial institution dedicated to the mission of working together for a better financial future. In support of that mission, Barclays offers diversified services, including consumer banking, corporate banking, wealth management, and investment management.
Larisa Kvetnoy, Managing Director of Post-Trade Technology at Barclays, and Shakir Ahmed, Barclays’ Head of International Securities Settlements Technology, took the stage at the 2024 CamundaCon in New York City to explain how Barclays is using Camunda to orchestrate the complex post-trade settlement process.
The goal: timely and accurate post-trade settlements
The post-trade settlement process is an exacting one, with multiple steps and firm deadlines based on asset class. Once a trade is executed, it needs to be validated, enriched with additional data for processing, and confirmed bilaterally with the counterparty before settlement. Approximately 10 to 12 functions need to happen in correlation and tight sequence, depending on the financial product and regional regulations. If one function fails, the other functions fail as well.
In a recent interview from behind-the-scenes at CamundaCon NYC ’24, Shakir Ahmed and Larisa Kvetnoy spoke about the transition from legacy systems to microservices architecture, about overcoming the challenges of outdated platforms, and about achieving architectural governance. They discuss the role of Camunda 8 in process orchestration, enhancing Barclays’ operational visibility, agility in regulatory adaptation, and the interplay between microservices and process automation. Discover their insights on resilience, distributed systems, and leveraging Camunda’s cloud-native features for a future-ready post-trade environment.
As a global investment bank, Barclays must ensure timely settlement of investment transactions to manage risk, comply with industry regulations, and ensure liquidity. But a combination of a complex, legacy infrastructure made it increasingly difficult for the post-trade settlement process to execute smoothly from end to end. The team knew they needed to modernize.
The need: tame complexity and increase straight-through processing
Barclays faced three significant industry challenges that ultimately led them to prioritize the modernization of their post-trade settlement process.
First, the banking industry as a whole faces increased regulatory scrutiny. It’s imperative that financial institutions have accurate data and control to explain processes, decisions, and actions to regulators.
Second, transaction settlement cycles are shrinking. In May of 2024, for example, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission began requiring most broker-dealer transactions to be settled within a timeframe of the trade date plus one day (“T+1”), one day sooner than the previous T+2 requirement.
Third, the need to stay competitive in the market puts constant pressure on financial institutions to control costs. That means efficiency is critical. But as a long-established bank, Barclay’s enterprise architecture evolved over decades, from manual systems to mainframes to monolithic systems to microservices. And as Larisa described, maintaining the myriads of legacy platforms was not getting any cheaper.
They had already undertaken a program to eliminate redundancy by breaking their legacy, monolithic platforms into respective functions, each represented by a microservice. However, the team quickly realized that managing the interactions between the microservices was becoming too complex. As part of a plan to improve microservices management, they evaluated the potential benefits of an orchestration or choreography approach and chose orchestration because it gave them full control and visibility to all their processes—important for regulatory compliance.
“That’s where we looked at Camunda,” said Larisa. Camunda’s processing speed, scalability, and cloud-native capability were an advantage. “It looked very appealing, especially with the Camunda 8 version. It all started with us downloading the product on the weekend, playing with the features.”
The solution: Use Camunda to orchestrate processes and microservices from end to end
Barclays now uses Camunda for end-to-end process orchestration and the orchestration of microservices.
They began by building out a use case for an FX forward trade process, starting with trade capture through all the steps of validation, enrichment, confirmation, exception handling, settlement matching, and reporting. A message bus provides instant and constant persistence and distribution, and Camunda, as the “orchestrator,” coordinates tasks back and forth.
At all times, the orchestrator has the ultimate intelligence of what needs to happen in sequence, which is important because FX forward trades are an asset class with a high volume of trades and frequent complications with matchings and confirmations. Though Barclays’ exception handling currently remains embedded in legacy platforms, the team was able to integrate it into the new Camunda architecture, allowing them to define incidents and exceptions very quickly, tag them, categorize them appropriately, and place them in the correct queue so they can be review and addressed.
“The fact that we are able to coexist with a 30-year-old technology and have connectivity through adapters shows you the fungibility of this,” said Shakir.
The outcomes: better speed, scale, agility, visibility, and resilience
With Camunda acting as the orchestrator and the use of the post-trade bus, Barclays was able to build a loosely coupled architecture and separation of concerns.
To date, the team has seen significant benefits from the new architecture, including enhanced speed, scale, and resilience; improved control and visibility; error recovery; agility; and improved time to market.
They appreciate the additional benefits of the new Camunda architecture, as well. For example, Camunda Operate gives the team “constant eyes and ears on our event,” said Shakir. “Previously, it was hard to answer questions about the status of trades, because with monolithic systems, we have to run database queries. Having a console like Operate lets us see where we are at any given time. That alone is a major benefit of the tool.”
The automatic backup ability of the cloud-native Zeebee engine and Camunda’s capability to quickly recover from a state of failure are also key benefits of the new architecture. Shakir explained, “If someone has to replay 10,000 trades because of an outage, doing that on the fly with a UI console is very powerful.”
The next step: ramping up process volume by 14x
Based on the success of the Camunda architecture, the Barclays team has plans to expand the use of Camunda in 2025.
Barclays is currently supporting approximately 35,000 processes per day on Camunda. In 2025, the team expects to scale up the volume by 14x, to about one-half million processes per day. Continuing on their substantial modernization journey, they also plan to decommission their cash settlement system, which currently runs on a mainframe, and move cash settlements to Camunda.
As Shakir commented, “The reality is, most banks are not going to be able to get the budget to just shut off your legacy platforms and build brand new, right? So, you have to coexist, and you have to deprecate the legacy while building up your services. This architecture lets us do that.”
Get the full story: Watch the CamundaCon replays
Barclays’ story is an example of how a process orchestration layer can help organizations take a phased approach to modernization without slowing output. Hear more from Shakir and Larisa at the link below, and watch additional on-demand presentations from our financial industry clients, such as BNY, U.S. Bank, and Capital One. Also, if you’d like to know more about how the team at Barclays transformed their post-trade settlements offering with Camunda, please take a look at our ‘Barclays’ Post-Trade Core Services Technology Transformation with Camunda‘ success story.
Start the discussion at forum.camunda.io