Navigating transformation: Inside GBST Composer’s technological shift
When fintech company GBST embarked on a multi-year, multi-million-dollar investment and advancement program of its flagship Composer wealth administration platform, it had three clear purposes in mind. It set out to transform the underlying technology stack; modernise the user experience to deliver a responsive, content-driven digital engagement solution; and build additional functionality to support future market and client needs.
GBST’s global CEO, Robert DeDominicis (pictured), explained the company’s approach to the technological shift and how it has delivered on its aims.
As a financial technology organisation with a forty-year pedigree, GBST understands the need for continual innovation to remain in tune with customer needs. A few years ago, it recognised that while Composer offered extensive functionality across multiple customer propositions and distribution channels, the underlying technology would not be able to meet the evolving needs of the financial services industry over the long term.
As Robert DeDominicis explained, “We saw that industry demand was shifting towards flexible, scalable, and interoperable cloud-native solutions. To stay competitive and continue to deliver innovative solutions to our clients, we needed to transform and modernise our technology infrastructure.”
However, transforming a legacy system into a modern, cloud-native SaaS platform is a complex process. It involves rearchitecting the underlying infrastructure, redesigning the software architecture, leveraging advancements in modern technology, and putting in place new processes to build, test, and deploy upgrades. With millions of investor accounts and more than 100 brands across the world relying heavily on its range of software solutions for critical functions, GBST understood the need to minimise disruption to client operations. The upgrade therefore required careful planning, testing, and execution with expert internal and external management.
DeDominicis said, “We work with many regulated financial institutions, so avoiding interruptions in service was crucial. Rather than taking a ‘big bang’ approach, we chose to deploy the upgrade through a series of releases over an extended period, with existing clients using both new and old functionality and screens simultaneously. This co-existence helped us deliver a smoother transition and ensured clients were comfortable with the new user experience before we retired the legacy user interface.”
Now the programme is complete, clients using the transformed platform are benefitting from a range of new capabilities aimed at improving agility, automation, scalability, user experience, analytics, interoperability, security, and compliance. Delivered on AWS, the cloud native Composer stack has a microservices architecture that allows for easier development, deployment, and maintenance of the new technology. The extensive API capabilities allow clients to adapt to changing business needs more effectively, facilitating seamless integrations with internal and third-party applications. The Composer architecture also leverages auto-scaling capabilities of the cloud, allowing the platform to handle larger volumes of transactions and accounts while maintaining high levels of performance and reliability, without adding significant cost.
One important change following the transformation is the improved user experience. GBST has created a more responsive design and intuitive dashboards as well as new guided journeys and proactive notifications. They have also given back-office users the ability to customise their experience with personalised views, dashboards, and the option to add frequently accessed menus to favourites.
Describing the changes, DeDominicis added, “We’re committed to UX excellent and wanted to think about the needs of our users beyond the obvious functionalities. We’ve made the platform far more intuitive and responsive, bringing design and efficiency functionalities to the back office that are typically associated with a digital portal experience. As a result, our clients have seen productivity increase, and been able to simplify the onboarding experience and training required for new users.”
Security was another key focus during the transformation journey, to support clients in managing the ever-evolving cyber threat landscape. Composer’s long-standing secure by design approach is embedded in the new platform, which uses cloud architecture best practices and includes security safeguards in the development lifecycle.
DeDominicis said, “The increasing threat of cyber-attack makes the security of their technology paramount to organisations today, especially within the financial services sector. Our modern, cloud-native architecture and containerised approach offers increased resilience and enhanced compliance, supporting business continuity. We also leverage AWS’s significant ongoing investment in security, with automated releases and upgrades to address emerging vulnerabilities.”
Reflecting on the transformation programme, DeDominicis added, “The team has worked tirelessly to move Composer from a monolithic platform to a modern, modular, future-ready cloud-based architecture. We’ve delivered significant improvements to support our clients’ operations, with minimal disruption to existing users, and at the same time enhanced our competitiveness, agility, and ability to support new product propositions.
“But it doesn’t end there. We’re committed to ongoing innovation and will continue to deliver new capabilities and enhance our solutions to remain at the leading edge of wealth management technology.”
