KGI Securities, the second-largest securities brokerage in Taiwan has transformed its core systems to a new architecture for agile operating environment and offer IT teams with critical resources to develop new applications faster.
The business adopted Red Hat OpenShift to meet market demands and keep up with evolving IT technology.
KGI Securities' Chief Information Officer Jung-Lin Huang said the company would gain a competitive edge with support from Red Hat containerised platform.
KGI is a wholly owned subsidiary of China Development Financial (CDF). It provides a comprehensive range of financial products and services, including wealth management, brokerage, proprietary trading, underwriting, and bonds.
It has subsidiaries in China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore, and Indonesia.
The company faced limitations with outdated information systems to meet customer demands and adapt to market changes.
To add new features, such as setting up a regular fixed investment portfolio or a price notification, their complex systems involved significant integration work and other development and maintenance costs.
KGI began its digital transformation project in May 2023, investing an estimated over US$308 million (S$419 million), Huang said.
The company decided to move on to open source technology and Red Hat OpenShift to enable critical subsystems to deliver real-time responses.
It hoped this would also prepare the firm for hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Business benefits
One of the company's first project is to reform the crucial ‘financial middle ground’ that gives customers real-time information during trading.
Scheduled to launch in 2024, Huang said the platform will be built on a containerised
microservices architecture, allowing easy management of decentralised applications on a single interface.
"Stable, localised services will also allow quick responses to maintenance, support and consulting requests," he added.
KGI Securities also adopted Red Hat Quay--a scalable private registry platform for managing content across globally distributed data centres and cloud environments.
It has deployed Clair—an open source project that provides a tool to monitor container security.
This enables OpenShift administrators to continuously monitor the status of images in the OpenShift management interface as well as scan images and issue warnings.
The new architecture has allowed KGI Securities to adopt a more agile DevOps approach for software development.
Huang said it could improve division of tasks between the development and operations functions, reducing both application iteration cycles and communication costs.
Red Hat OpenShift also gives IT teams a vast pool of reusable components that can be combined to develop new applications.
KGI Securities now plans to further collaborate with Red Hat for the second phase of its transformation, a new ‘service middle ground’, in 2024. It aims to integrate customer inquiries, financial information and provisional estimates.
The company also plans to reintegrate all 21 existing systems and move them to a containerised platform.
Huang said, some of the other plans include the extension of Red Hat solutions to overseas subsidiaries and to develop a new API management platform, integrating various Linux operating systems into Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
