Broadridge Financial Solutions Modernizes Data Platform with AWS to Accelerate Innovation

Broadridge Financial Solutions (Broadridge) is a global fintech that provides critical infrastructure to banks, broker-dealers, and asset and wealth managers. Its Performance Reporting solution gives investment managers a platform to access daily updates on portfolio performances. The platform integrates and unifies data across order, portfolio, and risk management systems. It also provides financial services companies with a suite of analytics tools for returns computations, benchmarking, historic performance calculations, as well as other measures.

As the world’s financial landscape has evolved, digitally native newcomers have begun using data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to make investment decisions. Recognizing this shift and wanting to help its customers compete more effectively, Broadridge set out to transition its Performance Reporting platform from on premises to a flexible infrastructure that can support AI and machine learning (ML) in the future.

Shantvijay Puranik, associate vice president–business at Broadridge, says, “The Performance Reporting application must efficiently manage continuously expanding data to maintain a comprehensive historical record for reporting purposes. It also requires the ability to scale processing capacity up and down during month-end and quarter-end periods. After thorough evaluation, Amazon Web Services [AWS] was chosen as the dependable technology stack for this solution.”

The company chose to migrate its Performance Reporting platform to AWS, which was already supporting the company’s Policies and Insights solution to simplify corporate governance. However, Broadridge needed a suitable approach for transferring data from its Performance Reporting’s data warehouse to AWS. Barath Ravichander, technology architect at Broadridge, explains, “Our legacy version of VMware Greenplum made it challenging to migrate the environment to the cloud using standard tools. We needed another approach.”

Working with an AWS Technical Account Manager, Broadridge migrated its platform data from VMware Greenplum using AWS Glue, a serverless data integration tool for preparing and moving data.

The company decided to transition smaller customers—those with Performance Reporting workloads under 15 million transactions—to Amazon Aurora, a serverless database service. Meanwhile, for customers dealing with over 10 billion trade records, Broadridge migrated its workloads to Amazon Redshift, a cloud-native data warehouse.

The migration was initiated with only 10 lines of code, with 2 terabytes of data transfer to AWS taking only 4 hours. Broadridge moved 2.3 billion transaction records from Greenplum to Amazon Redshift in under 8 hours for large clients.

By transitioning its Performance Reporting platform from an on-premises infrastructure to AWS, Broadridge reduced platform costs by 50 percent, freeing up resources to invest back into development. In addition, the company has lowered management time by up to 30 percent. “By using AWS managed services, we’re no longer spending time on routine administration tasks like spinning up bare-metal servers,” says Barath.

Furthermore, Broadridge has increased its Performance Reporting platform’s performance by 45 percent by switching from an online analytical processing (OLAP) system with Greenplum to an online transaction processing (OLTP) system on AWS. The OLTP provides shorter response times compared to OLAP and is optimized for high-frequency, high-volume transactional data in line with the needs of the Performance Reporting solution.