Waton Securities International Accelerates The Digital Transformation of Global Brokerage on AWS

Waton Securities International (Waton) is an integrated brokerage service provider founded in 1989 and headquartered in Hong Kong, with an R&D team located in Mainland China and offices in several regions around the globe. When it was starting to expand to markets outside of Greater China, Waton was unable to provide an equitable trading experience for customers overseas. Its original infrastructure had been designed to primarily serve Chinese mainland users. This inadequacy resulted in low-availability challenges, prompting Waton to evaluate new systems that could better serve its global clients. Waton determined that adopting fully managed cloud services was a necessary solution.

Given the unpredictable volatility and trading volumes in the securities market, Waton’s users not only require a flexible IT infrastructure to support the rapid expansion of applications and data, but also need to process large amounts of financial transaction data and customer data. These enterprises also need powerful data analysis and storage capabilities to respond to fast-paced changes in the financial market and to run real-time monitoring and securities trading analysis.

In addition, regulatory compliance in the securities market is getting stricter. To engage with a new business customer, companies must meet compliance requirements in multiple countries and regions. Waton needed to ensure that customer data met the security and compliance requirements of local securities markets.

Kai Zhou, CEO, Waton, noted that digitally transforming and upgrading traditional brokerage platforms were inevitable trends. Technological advancement will help reduce the marginal cost and deliver better services to more clients, and FinTech unicorns will be created in the wave of digitalization. “We firmly believe that Waton, with its 33-year history and service experience in the brokerage industry, running on AWS’s infrastructure and technology, will further the advancement and development of the whole brokerage industry,” said Kai Zhou.

With solid experience in major financial centers as well as in emerging markets, Waton wants to power a brokerage service offering that is highly efficient, cost-effective, well-rounded, robust, and compliant. Clients can easily access global cloud infrastructure and services, including customer management systems, order management systems, account management systems, market quotes and news information, know your customer/anti-money laundering (KYC/AML), transaction payment, and risk management.

By leveraging AWS, Waton successfully launched its Broker Cloud (SaaS) service, which lets traditional securities companies conduct real-time online trading. It reduces IT infrastructure and operation costs, such as hardware procurement, maintenance fees, and data center costs. Broker Cloud also improves resource utilization and business performance. In addition, Waton can accelerate application development and deployment, while being flexible with its choice of cloud-native services and tools to meet different business scenarios.

Waton currently uses AWS’s services including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and Application Load Balancer.

With AWS’s distributed architecture and high availability features, Waton can effectively avoid service interruptions at single points of failure and provide better trading experiences. Waton’s Broker Cloud runs on Amazon EC2 to enable front-end, middle-end and back-end service integration. It uses Amazon EKS for a consistent, fully supported Kubernetes solution on-premises, with integrated tooling and simple deployment to AWS Outposts, virtual machines, or bare metal servers.

Combining security services such as Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Amazon CloudTrail, Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), Amazon Key Management System (KMS), Amazon GuardDuty, and Amazon Artifact, Waton has built-in an automatic risk management artificial intelligence (AI) in the brokerage platform to help customers identify, monitor, and manage different risks and meet regulatory requirements. This also helps protect user data privacy, fund safety, and ensures business compliance in multiple scenarios.

To provide real-time processing, distribution of market quotations, and news feeds to clients, Waton runs its Broker Cloud on Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) for fully managed, highly reliable and secured data streaming services. In addition, the platform also covers log collection and big data processing.

With its in-depth understanding of the brokerage industry and value chain, Waton was able to build a holistic development system and cut its development cycle from several months to 2 to 4 weeks. It also reduced development costs by more than 40 percent.

The demand for digital transformation in the brokerage industry will continue to rise. This will accelerate the integration of big data and FinTech applications. Waton wants to empower more market participants to break through existing barriers and to deliver best-in-kind customer services efficiently and effectively, while creating more added value through tailored digital solutions. With the development of machine learning (ML) and AI, Waton is also exploring new trading strategy optimization and user service customization.

Waton Securities International (Waton) is an integrated brokerage service provider founded in 1989, headquartered in Hong Kong, with an R&D team located in China and offices in several regions around the globe. Waton Securities International is also a licensed securities broker (central number: AAK004) with 30+ years of sound track record and brokerage experience in the securities industry. It strictly complies with the requirements of the SFO, and provides Broker Cloud (SaaS) services, while committing to providing customers with simple, safe, and reliable securities trading services.