FNZ Opens Up Wealth Together with F5
FNZ is a leading global end-to-end wealth management platform that provides wealth management platforms and solutions to financial institutions, including banks, insurers, and asset managers. The company selected F5 Distributed Cloud Services to provide a unified networking and security environment across its distributed global platform. Streamlining operations will enable FNZ to broaden the benefits of wealth management to a global audience.
Business Challenge
The wealth management industry is undergoing a global transformation driven by customer demands for more personalized, affordable investment strategies. Wealth managers responded by prioritizing the customer experience and using technology to deliver bespoke investment strategies through digital devices and channels. At the forefront of this transformation is FNZ, a leading global end-to-end wealth management platform. Its comprehensive platform integrates technology, infrastructure, and investment operations serving more than 650 financial institutions and 12,000 wealth managers globally.
Luke Fanthome, Head of Infrastructure and Cloud Security at FNZ, says, “We have US $1.5 trillion in assets under administration while our clients serve 20 million individual investors.” A growing number of these investors fall outside the traditional high-net-worth demographic. “Our vision is to help clients widen the reach of their services to other groups with investible assets.” These include younger generations, women, and entrepreneurs.
FNZ's ambitious growth strategy presented several technical hurdles. The main challenge stemmed from the platform’s organic evolution through rapid regional expansion and acquisitions. This resulted in core technologies and applications running across heterogeneous environments spanning all major cloud providers and on-premises deployments. This complex infrastructure was difficult to manage with a relatively small IT team and made it difficult to effectively scale.
Fanthome’s team set its sights on building a secure hybrid and multicloud environment. This new architecture would support the deployment, management, and security of applications across any location. “We strive to deliver products that are agnostic to underlying application stacks,” he says. “Clients shouldn’t be burdened by the technical intricacies of how their solutions are built or delivered.”
Security remains paramount in this multicloud landscape. “Our priorities are achieving faster time-to-market, streamlining client onboarding, and continuously enhancing security, all without growing staff or operational overhead,” Fanthome says.
Solution
FNZ, a longstanding customer of F5 BIG-IP solutions, chose F5 Distributed Cloud Services to satisfy three main use cases: application delivery, secure multicloud networking, and web app and API protection (WAAP).
“While alternative vendors and capabilities exist, particularly for app security, the pool narrowed significantly when seeking a solution that matched F5’s strengths,” says Fanthome. “What truly differentiated F5 was its ability to function as the global network backbone, which enables us to seamlessly connect geographically dispersed data centers and public cloud regions.” This interconnectedness is crucial since FNZ’s wealth management customers increasingly demand the flexibility to host applications in either public clouds or at their preferred data centers.
Security was another critical requirement. F5 Distributed Cloud Services enable FNZ to use industry-leading application and API security to mitigate threats and vulnerabilities across a unified hybrid and multicloud environment. Fanthome lauds the platform’s advanced features like the blindfold for secrets management, which he describes as “mind-blowing.”
He says, “Through our collaboration with F5, FNZ harnesses expert knowledge and innovative solutions, ensuring both current and prospective customers of our commitment to application development and delivery.”
The depth and breadth of F5 support, encompassing both product and solution engineering teams, also played a vital role in the decision. FNZ benefitted from in-depth product roadmap discussions and a strong commitment from F5 to adapt and tailor a solution to FNZ’s unique technological and business needs.
“Ultimately the synergy of F5’s powerful technology, architectural guidance, and exceptional customer support confirmed them as the clear and strategic partner for the future of our platform,” says Fanthome.
Results
Delivering a better wealth management experience
FNZ’s multi-year collaboration with F5 involves modernizing its infrastructure by migrating from an F5 BIG-IP environment to F5 Distributed Cloud Services. This shift to modern, multicloud application delivery enables FNZ to significantly enhance its service offerings, giving it the ability to maintain robust security and reduce the burden on IT and security teams.
Distributed Cloud Network Connect plays a critical role in securely connecting distributed networks between public clouds, on-premises data centers, and remote sites, while Distributed Cloud App Connect addresses connectivity for clustered microservices-based applications across these same distributed sites.
“F5’s secure multicloud networking solution enables us to eliminate limitations imposed by client environments,” says Fanthome. “We can now deliver our entire product suite on all major cloud providers or on-premises based on client preference.”
Accelerating application delivery
Distributed Cloud App Stack brings enormous benefits to the DevOps lifecycle. FNZ can leverage infrastructure and application as code, reducing deployment times from weeks to just minutes. Being able to roll out software seamlessly to any global location brings huge efficiencies that can be passed on to customers.
“Financial institutions will be able to deliver new offerings to their customers faster and at lower cost with F5 Distributed Cloud Services,” says Fanthome. “This enhances our competitive edge, especially in new markets.”
Simplified compliance management
As a global entity, FNZ must adhere to a complex web of regional regulations, particularly regarding data residency and privacy. Expanding into regions like North America also exposes it to stricter enforcement. Here, FNZ can take advantage of many F5 solutions that are purpose-built to handle top-tier compliance standards.
“Data protection and privacy regulations are constantly evolving,” says Fanthome. “F5 plays a vital role in helping us comply with the latest regulations, especially those governing secure connectivity across diverse IT environments.”
Unified security posture
The web app and API protection (WAAP) capabilities of Distributed Cloud Services enable FNZ to standardize security across all instances of its application suite. “Previously, reacting to threats detected by our API sensors required manual intervention and implementation delays,” explains Fanthome. “F5 enables us to automate a significant portion of this process, drastically reducing our time to respond.”
This automation also boosts the confidence of FNZ’s customers by fostering a more secure wealth management ecosystem. “For all our clients, the integrity and safety of customer data and funds is an absolute priority. Being able to pre-empt and resolve threats demonstrates our willingness to go the extra mile to protect their businesses and end users.”
Operational efficiency drives innovation
The secure multicloud networking capabilities of Distributed Cloud Services empower FNZ’s lean IT team to effectively manage their continuously expanding environment. Streamlined application deployment, automated security, and centralized control are expected to significantly reduce operational expenditure on maintaining customer deployments. Reduced reliance on specialized cloud skillsets further minimizes workload burdens.
“Our purpose is to open up wealth and help everyone, everywhere, invest in their future on their terms,” says Fanthome. “F5 Distributed Cloud Services will help free up our IT resources to innovate wealth management solutions for a broader audience of wealth managers and end-users than ever before.”
- Simplifies compliance management
- Delivers a unified security posture
- Drives innovation through greater operational efficiency
- Improves wealth management for a global audience
- Unifies operations across multicloud infrastructure
- Deliver services independent of underlying stack
- Scale fast to match business growth ambitions
- Manage complex infrastructure with small team
- Reduce time to respond to security issues
- Accelerate application deployment
- Overcome complexities of multicloud environment