FinClear modernises critical post-trade platforms on AWS
At a glance
Facing a firm data centre decommission deadline, FinClear partnered with Cevo to migrate its critical post-trade clearing and settlement platforms from on-premises co-location facilities to AWS in six months, with minimal disruption to market operations. The AI-accelerated migration reduced reliance on ageing infrastructure, improved database performance, strengthened disaster recovery, lowered operational overhead and created a modern cloud foundation for future growth.
Capabilities
Industry
Financial Services
About FinClear
The FinClear Group is one of Australia’s leading independent technology and infrastructure providers for capital markets. Through its Execution and Clearing Services division, FinClear provides trading and settlement infrastructure for more than 1,400,000 investor accounts across 250 stockbroker and investment advisory firms trading on the ASX, Cboe and International exchanges with services spanning execution, clearing, settlement, HIN sponsorship, corporate actions processing and client cash management.
Business challenge
FinClear’s clearing and settlement services operate in a highly regulated environment, and the systems underpinning the business require strong resilience, availability and control.
With supporting infrastructure approaching end-of-life in July 2026 and a subsequently aggressive data centre decommission deadline, FinClear needed to move quickly while maintaining continuity and meeting regulatory expectations for operational resilience.
The existing environment was also limiting performance and scalability, particularly for database workloads constrained by disk performance. As data volumes and operational demand grew, FinClear needed stronger performance, greater flexibility and a more sustainable platform.
The migration was complex. FinClear’s post-trade systems included critical internal and third-party workloads built up through growth and acquisition.
FinClear also had to work around Australia’s financial market rhythm. Production cutovers could only take place after market close or on weekends, and every change had to be validated before the next trading day.
FinClear needed a specialised AWS migration partner that could bring structure to a complex environment, manage risk at every stage, complete the migration before the deadline and avoid disruption to critical market services.
Solution
Cevo partnered with FinClear to design and execute a phased AWS migration that balanced speed with risk management and minimised disruption to live market operations.
The engagement covered discovery, assessment, AWS landing zone implementation, network and security architecture, infrastructure build, database migration, disaster recovery design, cutover execution and post-migration support. Throughout delivery, Cevo used AI tooling, including Kiro, to accelerate repeatable migration activities, improve consistency and reduce manual effort across planning, build, documentation and troubleshooting.
Phased migration approach
Cevo used a practical, risk-managed delivery approach. Non-production environments were migrated first, giving the team a safe way to validate the approach, uncover dependencies and refine cutover steps before moving production workloads.
To support this process, Cevo used Kiro to help standardise migration scaffolding, including reusable CI/CD pipeline patterns and infrastructure-as-code templates. This helped the team move faster while maintaining consistency across workloads and reducing the risk of configuration drift.
Each production cutover was planned around market operating hours, with validation completed before workloads were returned to service. During cutover planning and support, Cevo also used AI-assisted log analysis across sources such as VPC Flow Logs, application logs, system events and CloudTrail via CloudWatch Logs Insights, helping the team identify root causes and recommended fixes more quickly when issues needed investigation.
Server migration
Cevo used AWS Transform MGN, formerly AWS Application Migration Service, to migrate more than 150 servers and 180TB of data from FinClear’s VMware environment to Amazon EC2.
Continuous replication kept source and target environments aligned during the trading day, allowing cutovers after market close. AWS Direct Connect provided a private network path for replication traffic.
As part of migration planning, Cevo used Kiro to support workload mapping, helping match on-premises servers to right-sized AWS instances based on CPU, memory and storage requirements. This reduced manual analysis and helped avoid over or under-provisioning.
Database migration strategy
Databases were critical to the migration. FinClear had 20 databases across 15 applications, and several workloads required greater operational control than managed database services could provide.
Cevo assessed each database and selected SQL Server on Amazon EC2 where control was required, preserving workload flexibility while improving performance on modern cloud infrastructure.
To support consistency, Cevo used EC2 Image Builder to create hardened golden Amazon Machine Images for standalone and high-availability database configurations.
Network security
Cevo also redesigned FinClear’s network security model for AWS, replacing the on-premises reliance on third-party firewalls and proprietary threat intelligence with cloud-native controls.
Using a data-led approach, the team reviewed traffic patterns, created rules based on validated requirements, and established a default-deny posture supported by formal change control.
AWS Transit Gateway supported network segmentation, helping isolate workloads and enforce least-privilege access across the estate.
Disaster recovery and resilience
Cevo designed disaster recovery around FinClear’s business continuity requirements, with workloads classified by criticality in order to meet regulatory targets.
Mission-critical workloads were protected using AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery with continuous replication, supported by multi-AZ database and file services for high availability.
Managed services and cost optimisation
Cevo helped FinClear replace manual and legacy processes with AWS-native managed services. AWS Backup introduced centralised, policy-driven backup and retention, Amazon FSx for Windows File Server replaced traditional file shares with a managed multi-AZ service, and Amazon S3 with automated synchronisation replaced bespoke replication scripts.
Cost optimisation was addressed after cutover through opportunities such as developer-edition licensing in non-production environments, right-sized instances and instance families that support unbundled licensing. AWS Cost Optimisation Hub now provides ongoing recommendations based on real usage.
To support handover and ongoing operations, Cevo also used Kiro to help maintain living documentation as the environment changed, reducing knowledge gaps and giving FinClear clearer operational reference material after migration.
Outcomes
FinClear successfully migrated its critical post-trade clearing and settlement platforms to AWS, reducing reliance on ageing data centre infrastructure and establishing a more resilient, scalable and supportable technology foundation. The migration improved performance, strengthened resilience and reduced operational risk across platforms that support daily market activity for more than 1,400,000 investor accounts and 250 stockbroking and investment advisory firms.
Key outcomes included:
- Reduced infrastructure risk: Migrated more than 150 servers and 180TB of data from ageing on-premises infrastructure to AWS.
- Strengthened operational resilience: Established a more resilient foundation across 15 applications and 20 databases, with recovery objectives designed to meet regulatory targets.
- Improved database performance: Delivered more than 10x faster TempDB write performance, more than 4x faster database reads and more than 3x faster database writes for core production workloads.
- Improved processing efficiency: Increased batch processing throughput by 25% and reduced severe database blocking events by 95%.
- Reduced operational overhead: Replaced manual and legacy processes with AWS-native managed services for backup, file services and environment synchronisation.
- AI-accelerated delivery: Cevo’s use of Kiro reduced manual effort throughout the migration, helping accelerate setup from days to hours, improve consistency across workloads, support right-sizing decisions and reduce time spent investigating issues during migration.
- Strengthened security posture: Implemented cloud-native firewalling, network segmentation and least-privilege access patterns through AWS Network Firewall and AWS Transit Gateway.
- Created a scalable cloud foundation: Established a modern AWS platform to support future growth, ongoing optimisation and service evolution.
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