Delivering Trading Anywhere for Sucden Financial
Read time: 4 mins
Overview
With a history and heritage in commodity futures and options trading, Sucden Financial has evolved and diversified to become a leading multi-asset execution, clearing and liquidity provider across FX, fixed income, and commodities.
Client Profile
Addressing the need for multi-platform trading capabilities
In 2001, Sucden Financial’s Trading and Risk Platform (STAR) was launched exclusively for their clients and internal execution teams trading futures and options. The trading system connects to key global exchanges, including CME, ICE, and the London Metal Exchange with its unique prompt-date structure.
Sucden Financial saw the demand for multi-platform trading capabilities grow throughout the industry and set out to provide a complimentary mobile trading platform. Given the rapid changes in emerging technologies within this space, they needed a partner with full-stack mobile application development, UX design capability experience, and proven domain expertise.
Why Version 1?
- Version 1 specialises in application modernisation with clients that include some of the world’s largest Financial Services organisations.
- Version 1 has the domain and technical expertise to deliver trading applications that connect customers to the market.
- Version 1 has proven experience in leveraging modern cloud technologies, which will become the foundation for Sucden Financial’s expansion into the cloud.
- Version 1 has significant experience in delivering class-leading UX design across a wide range of industries and a dedicated team with experience in multiple platforms.
Solution
Providing a unified trading experience
Sucden Financial needed to adapt to the changing needs of their clients by expanding their service offering to include a mobile trading application. By integrating this app into their existing trading and risk platform STAR, clients would be afforded the flexibility to trade from anywhere. Users would easily be able to view market data, order book, trades, positions and enter orders from either Android or iOS devices.
The team developed a platform-agnostic application leveraging a microservices architecture, which was implemented in Java with a React Native mobile application. Microservices were integrated with Sucden Financial’s STAR application to provide a unified trading experience on desktop and mobile. The platform was deployed on the Azure Kubernetes Service, allowing for redundancy and dynamic scaling.
Version 1’s UX design team designed a bespoke mobile application that echoed the look and feel of the original platform to ensure a familiar and intuitive interface for end users. The UX team collaborated extensively with Sucden Financial’s in-house end users, delivering interactive prototypes iteratively, ensuring the customer had direct control of the outcome throughout.
STAR Mobile was successfully launched on iOS and Android in June 2021.
Real Difference, Delivered.
As a result of this engagement, the following benefits were delivered to Sucden Financial:
- Increased User Adoption and Revenue through Multi Channel Strategy
Due to the introduction of a mobile application, the customer’s end users can now access their trading account whenever and wherever they may be. This offering has helped the customer to attract new users and increase user activity resulting in increased revenue.
- Delivery of a Mobile Application
Version 1 delivered a fully functional iOS and Android mobile app available through the App Store and Google Play Store, respectively, and approximately 30% of STAR users have a mobile login.
- Introduction of Cloud Services
Version 1 has been working with Sucden Financial since 2019 to help accelerate their move to Microsoft Azure, which has included the migration of applications and databases.
About Version 1
Version 1 proves that IT can make a real difference to our customers’ businesses. We are trusted by global brands to deliver IT services and solutions which drive customer success. Our team of difference-makers work tirelessly to provide independent advice and deliver impactful changes to help our customers navigate the rapidly changing Digital-First world we live in. Our greatest strength is balance in our efforts to achieve Customer Success, Empowered People and a Strong Organisation, underpinned by a commitment to our values. We believe this is what makes Version 1 different and more importantly, our customers agree.
