PhillipCapital’s Cloud Shift Delivers a 30% Trading Performance Boost

PhillipCapital Australia, part of the broader PhillipCapital Group, provides wealth management, currency trading, and stockbroking services. In 2024, it became a full-service brokering firm through the acquisition of a Perth-based clearing and settlement provider. While continuing to serve institutional and private investors, the company saw an opportunity to offer technology services to other financial firms across Australia.

To capture this market, PhillipCapital built a unified trading platform that allows brokerages to streamline operations via API-based integration. “Our solution is a game changer in Australia—and everyone we speak to agrees—because we’ve created a core platform that consolidates multiple brokering systems to give users a cost-effective trading capability in one shot,” says Craig Semmens, chief executive officer of PhillipCapital Australia.

However, scaling the platform as a technology service required far more agility and flexibility than the company’s aging on-premises infrastructure could deliver. Running on Windows Server 2008, with rising VMware licensing and infrastructure maintenance costs on the horizon, the existing environment was increasingly unsustainable. “Our IT needed to be more agile and scalable on demand for our technology business to grow,” says Semmens.

Security and compliance were also critical priorities in the highly regulated financial services industry. “Protecting client data was non-negotiable,” Semmens explains. “Customer trust is everything in our sector, and we could not risk any compliance failures.”

To support its expansion into technology services, PhillipCapital Australia worked with AWS and AWS Partner Interactive Pty to migrate its trading platform from a third-party hosting datacenter to the cloud. The team used AWS Application Migration Service to move servers and databases into Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) environments across multiple Availability Zones, ensuring high availability and reliability.

Interactive Pty worked closely with PhillipCapital throughout the migration, designing an architecture that surpassed industry standards. “We knew AWS was the market leader in cloud services,” says Semmens. “Interactive Pty took that foundation and delivered a solution that exceeded our expectations.”

To establish a dedicated connection between its on-premises systems and AWS, the team implemented AWS Direct Connect. PhillipCapital migrated its back-office and middle-office systems to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Auto Scaling instances.

Security and compliance were also key priorities. PhillipCapital adopted AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Shield, AWS WAF, and AWS CloudTrail to meet financial regulations and protect sensitive data. The team also modernized operations using AWS Systems Manager, AWS CloudFormation, and Amazon EventBridge to automate routine tasks.

As a result, provisioning and deploying servers is now 90–95 percent faster, 80 percent of scaling tasks and 70 percent of patch management are automated, and monitoring tools can be set up in half the time.

By migrating from VMware, PhillipCapital also eliminated legacy licensing constraints and gained architectural flexibility—freeing the business from hardware provisioning cycles and vendor lock-in.

“These efficiency gains—as well as the 48 percent cost savings from moving away from VMware—freed up our team to focus on cloud upskilling and innovation,” says Shiny Sukumaran, head of IT infrastructure at PhillipCapital Australia.

Since migrating to AWS, PhillipCapital Australia has seen a 20–30 percent improvement in network transit times, resulting in faster trading system performance and a better customer experience. “The speed increase across the platform has been a key benefit of migrating to AWS—customers have felt the difference,” says Semmens.

Beyond performance gains, the migration has positioned PhillipCapital to grow as a financial services technology provider. “With AWS, we’ve established a flexible foundation that aligns with many of our clients’ cloud strategies,” Semmens adds. “Our biggest client is also an AWS customer and understands the reliability and security of the platform.”

The migration has also improved internal operations. The IT team can now restore critical workloads within 2 hours and provision infrastructure much faster. “Migrating to AWS has transformed the agility of our IT. Routine operations like spinning up servers take seconds instead of hours, freeing up time to work on new platform features,” says Sukumaran.

Looking ahead, the team plans to modernize further to optimize costs and adopt emerging technologies. PhillipCapital is particularly interested in using AI to deliver future services, such as fraud detection and trade surveillance. “The migration is a game-changer for the business,” Sukumaran adds. “We can now focus on building a roadmap that explores how AWS can continue to improve the customer experience, especially through AI.”