“Our transition from on-premises to cloud-based within two years is nothing short of extraordinary. Azure Kubernetes Service has changed how we go to market as a business unit.”
Paul Imel, Principal Software Engineer, Finastra
Making paperwork less work
Finastra, a UK-based financial software company, is focused on making sure that preparing and managing loan paperwork is as simple as possible for financial institutions. Managing this documentation is time-consuming and can lead to potential errors, but making sure that every document is accurate and corresponds to all regulations is vital to avoiding excess costs. LaserPro, the company’s flagship product, auto-generates the documents to streamline the process, keeping the documents in one place and creating standardized document formats to improve paperwork reviews. And all the documentation is created in accordance with legal and regulatory requirements.
LaserPro software is used by over 3,000 customers, including 2,800 of the largest 7,500 banks in the United States. For many years, LaserPro services were run entirely on-premises. Finastra provided quarterly updates to the software to address bugs and improve functionality, with customers manually downloading the updates on their own devices. But the company lost visibility into the customer’s configuration and requirements during each update.
“The increased support burden became a challenge,” explained Paul Imel, a Principal Software Engineer at Finastra. “We didn’t know how the customer had the product configured, and so it took more time and effort to keep it up and running on different devices.” Any issue could take a while to evaluate, much less fix. Furthermore, there were no standard APIs to allow for smooth integration between LaserPro and other systems the bank might be using.
Finastra wanted a solution that would allow for faster updates and steadier management, which necessitated a move to the cloud within a two-year development window. As the company had already been using Azure services for years, the decision was to migrate the LaserPro applications from running on-premises virtual machines to Windows containers on Azure Kubernetes Service.
Transitioning to the cloud
Because Finastra had already been using Azure servers prior to the transition for product downloads and other online functionality, moving LaserPro from a thick on-premises application to a cloud-based service using Azure Kubernetes Service was straightforward. Many of the tools were already present and simply required a different implementation rather than rewriting the entire program from scratch. Microsoft also provided support during the migration process with multiple project checkpoints and weekly calls to assess the conversion process while ensuring that the project was hitting all necessary security protocols.
“Our transition from on-premises to cloud-based within two years is nothing short of extraordinary,” said Imel, “Azure Kubernetes Service has changed how we go to market as a business unit.”
Migration for clients, of course, needed to be smooth and reliable. Working with Microsoft helped Finastra make this into a straightforward process. By logging into Office 365 and then the existing on-premises version of LaserPro, migration is automatically handled via the back end while preserving all the client’s existing data and configuration options. This custom build made swapping to the newer version easy and avoided potentially lengthy data conversion.
Clear skies on the cloud
One of the obvious advantages granted to the Finastra side of operations is the ease of scaling operations dynamically. The orchestrator spins up an isolated and secure pod per user for a given session automatically via Azure Kubernetes Service, and metadata is sent to the software to ensure that LaserPro works as expected for the client. All data is dynamically filtered and checked against state and federal regulations, meaning that users are constantly getting the most up-to-date possible form of regulatory checks.
Product updates now come every two weeks instead of once per quarter. The updates are also automatically handled from the cloud service instead of being manually installed on-premises, which means that Finastra tech support no longer goes through the lengthy process of finding out details of the customer’s installed options and configuration. “Being cloud-based means we can handle the backup and recovery process, and that frees up our clients from the IT burden,” says Imel. “It saves time over complete rewrites, and we can improve and iterate faster; we couldn’t do that without Microsoft technology.”
This scalability works wonders for banks of all sizes. Smaller banks benefit from needing fewer IT personnel to manage the company’s software, as the installation is no longer on-premises. Larger banks get increased reliability of Azure, and the cloud servers can scale to their needs while also supporting a wider range of devices. In addition, Azure Kubernetes Service provides Finastra with a better development environment thanks to Azure DevOps, which helps with the faster update schedule. Better pipeline management, test environments, and board options ensure that developers can focus on specific functionality and iterate quickly. And by migrating to the cloud with centralized and managed deployments, Finastra benefits from increased security without the burden of managing security in-house.
Integration for every service
Azure Kubernetes Service also provides unified API libraries to let banks easily integrate LaserPro with existing services for other portions of their business. “Banks are becoming less interested in owning their own infrastructure; they want to quickly integrate their systems instead of dealing with long installation timelines. Being cloud-based lets us provide that flexibility,” explains Paul Imel. The API makes attaching other products, such as software to track financial history, a standardized process, making LaserPro a more flexible tool without needing an entire development studio in-house.
The container technology available within Azure Kubernetes Service allows for faster delivery of features than legacy systems. Because the application is split into smaller sections of self-contained code, any new development doesn’t require a complete rewrite of LaserPro from the ground up; features can be developed, tested, and rolled out individually while leaving the overall product untouched. This keeps software development at Finastra agile and able to respond to the changing needs of its clients.
Filling in the future
What’s next for Finastra? There’s still more optimization to be done within the LaserPro framework. An astonishingly quick turnaround time from an on-premises app to a cloud-based one means that the system can be further upgraded to take advantage of the cloud services. The company is also working to reduce resource usage to make even better use of the cloud servers, reducing workload and making the software more responsive.
The team at Finastra is also looking into how the AI capabilities from Microsoft can be used to further improve its software. Using AI to automate error-checking and data entry can further streamline portions of the paperwork and the review steps, making an already time-saving solution for banks into an even greater one with wider applications.
Finastra developed a core product that has always been about reducing the burden on banks when filling out complicated paperwork. By migrating LaserPro into a cloud-based format, Finastra has ensured that it’s even easier for banks to benefit from the software. That means less time spent on tedium and double-checking for errors, less redundant work for technology support, and more reliable resources for clients.
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“Being cloud-based means we can handle the backup and recovery process, and that frees up our clients from the IT burden. It saves time over complete rewrites, and we can improve and iterate faster; we couldn’t do that without Microsoft technology.”
Paul Imel, Principal Software Engineer, Finastra
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