In today's financial landscape, complexity, and regulatory changes pose significant challenges for banks, insurers, asset managers, and financial service providers. To thrive, they must embrace innovative digital infrastructure solutions that drive operational efficiencies, ensure compliance and risk mitigation, as well as foster innovation across all functions.

Financial institutions need to unlock new levels of efficiency and increase productivity while delivering personalized, seamless customer experiences. An evolving competitive landscape, new types of cyber threats, and changing regulatory requirements are compelling financial institutions to modernize their IT infrastructure.

Take the case of the Clearing Corporation of India Ltd (CCIL), a financial market infrastructure provider and key player in the Indian financial system. CCIL has provided guaranteed and non-guaranteed clearing and settlement services for over 20 years in Money, G-Secs, Foreign Exchange, and Derivative markets. Through its subsidiary, Clearcorp Dealing Systems Limited, CCIL has introduced various platforms for electronic deal execution in different market segments.

As an ecosystem enabler, CCIL places great emphasis on keeping pace with technological advancements. To manage the increasing volume and complexity of transactions in financial markets, CCIL decided to modernize its IT infrastructure which would help ensure efficient clearing and settlement of trades executed on stock exchanges.

Santosh Bhalerao, Vice President, Information Technology Infrastructure at CCIL says, "We believe that developing expertise in our core business areas and providing cost-effective and efficient solutions is crucial for our growth. Our focus is always to enhance the value we offer as IT, and to do that we need to ensure that we have the right technology in place.”

CCIL was eager to transition from a legacy environment built on older generation operating systems and hardware to Linux to establish a cutting-edge infrastructure, offering efficient and dependable services through open standard solutions. Seeking an enterprise-class platform, CCIL decided to deploy IBM LinuxONE. This server delivers IBM’s leadership in performance and security with the openness of the Linux operating system. Further, its architecture is uniquely designed to handle mission-critical tasks.

IBM and Red Hat collaborated with CCIL to conduct an onsite proof of concept (POC) of the IBM LinuxONE server. The POC exceeded most of the parameters when compared with erstwhile systems, increasing customer confidence. IBM and Red Hat teams jointly developed a successful solution that enabled CCIL to exceed SLAs for their mission-critical applications, while reducing the TCO of the overall infrastructure - including software significantly.

A comprehensive approach to migration and implementation, backed by strong customer support and service helped CCIL move from multiple physical  servers to a single LinuxONE server. This allowed for the consolidation of physical servers and workloads, which resulted in enhanced performance and energy efficiency. CCIL was able to successfully deploy an open platform with a cloud-ready architecture while ensuring future scalability, security, and performance.

According to Santosh Bhalerao, “IBM LinuxONE has helped CCIL substantially decrease maintenance expenses, operational and administration costs, along with enhanced hardware utilization. We saw significant improvement in both Online Transaction Processing, batch performance and a similar reduction in the infrastructure running costs, including: floorspace, power, and cooling.”

“Embracing a cloud-ready architecture enables companies like CCIL to modernize business applications and proactively meet future industry demands. Collaboration with industry experts and deployment of cutting-edge technologies exemplify how innovative solutions can drive competitiveness and success in the financial sector, ultimately propelling businesses toward sustained growth and excellence,” says Suresh Jayanthi, Business Unit Executive, IBM Z, India & South Asia, IBM.

Recognizing that its business performance is backed by a strong IT infrastructure, CCIL has always sought to provide state-of-the-art infrastructure for efficient and reliable service using open standard solutions. By adopting a cloud-ready architecture, CCIL is well-prepared to modernize business applications, software, and processes for future needs.