Pepperstone gains Trading competitive advantage by in-sourcing Pepperstone platform technology capability

Pepperstone was founded in 2010 in Melbourne by a team of experienced traders with a shared commitment to improve the world of online trading. Frustrated by delayed executions, expensive prices and poor customer support, Pepperstone set out to provide traders around the world with superior technology, low-cost spreads and a genuine commitment to helping them master trading across instruments including Forex, CFDs, Cryptocurrencies and Commodities.

Their mission is to create a world of tech-enabled trading where ambitious traders can embrace the challenge and opportunity of global markets. The result is an online Forex and CFD Broker providing traders across the globe with cutting-edge technology to trade the world’s markets. Pepperstone are trusted by over 400,000 traders around the world and process an average of US$9.2bn of trades every day, making them one of the world’s largest Forex brokers.

The challenge

Pepperstone leverages existing industry platforms for CFD orders. This allows the firm to focus on providing great customer service to traders, a key point of difference and powerfully successful tactic for establishing a brand and reputation in the market. Pepperstone had made customer service a key point of difference, however it was inevitable that to extend the level of customer service, there was a need to fully own the technology platform.

So, Pepperstone proceeded to develop a significant uplift in technology capability to bring the vision of a Pepperstone platform to life.

As part of this uplift in technology capability, Pepperstone forged a co-sourced team with Midnyte City to assist in delivery of the Pepperstone platform. The uplift in technology capability required a cultural and socio-technical transformation around operating critical trading infrastructure in-house.

The solution

The team built to tackle the challenge was composed of the Pepperstone technology team and Midnyte City. Midnyte City allowed for the Pepperstone technology team to be assembled and bolstered, while also not losing any momentum in delivery. The deep expertise provided by Midnyte City allowed for uplift in crucial areas such as Cloud Engineering and embedding processes into Pepperstone’s operations, environments, incident management and data protection.

This included workflows to allow deployment into segregated environments while focusing on efficiencies such as reduced deployment time and the adoption of continuous integration and continuous delivery. Some of the value delivered included:

• Environment segregation and networking
  Utilising advanced cloud engineering techniques including direct connectivity, traffic routing and managed gateways, Midnyte City created a global networking and environment segregation implementation to form the foundation of the Pepperstone platform.
  

• CI/CD
  Significant uplift in CI/CD maturity was required, with Midnyte City providing assistance with the reliability, consistency and ease of deployment across environments including the provision of an easy way to test pipelines prior to upgrades.
  

• Incident management
  Operating a global trading infrastructure required significant enhancements to the Pepperstone incident process, to operate 24x7 using a structured process to ensure timely notifications, rosters and integration into collaborative systems, which included escalation policies based on timing, duration and severity.
  

• Data protection
  Significantly advanced the architecture, topology and resilience of Pepperstone systems through scheduled and multi-region backup procedures.
  

The value

Owning the technology foundations of Pepperstone platform, has given Pepperstone significant control over their own features and differentiators, their product roadmap, traders’ user experience and speed of trading. It also created an important opportunity for global scaling and expanding into new international markets.

The partnership with Midnyte City has allowed Pepperstone to maintain momentum while also uplifting quality, cloud engineering and security practices across the Engineering group. This allowed Pepperstone to leverage the significant talents of Midnyte City while also building internal capability through which Midnyte City played a significant role in upskilling and maturity.

The result has been the delivery of a global Pepperstone platform with a corresponding uplift in internal capabilities across Cloud engineering, automation, testing, networking, incident management and security. This focus on growing internal intellectual property will serve the organisation now and into the future.