Sell-Side Technology Awards 2023: Best use of the agile methodology—Murex

Overview

With market volatility, new technologies emerging and disruptive events such as geopolitical crises, capital markets firms are challenged when introducing additional business value for trading, post-trade operations and risk management. Murex focuses on getting to market quickly with innovations at a controlled cost, enabled by the agile methodology adopted in its software development factory and its customer division, which leads implementation projects and services 60,000 daily users in 60 countries.

The solution

In the MX.3 Factory, 1,000 developers/engineers are responsible for extending the software platform and associated toolchain. Using a scaled agile framework allows Murex to prioritize developments, manage dependencies, and deliver them in a predictable timeframe.

In the Murex customer division, over 205,000 work days are deployed yearly to support customer transformations. An agile way of working enables productivity, quality and speed with large teams, thus leveraging diverse business, technical, test and project management expertise for Murex and its customers.

Secret sauce

DevOps at Murex is a natural extension of agile methods to align development and IT operations activities, embracing the entire software development lifecycle from design through the development process and into the deployment phase. This is possible with continuous testing and integration. Testing and porting activities from multiple development branches to the master are now fully automated to reduce effort, operational risk, and risks of conflicting customizations.

Recent enhancements

Thanks to a quarterly release of Murex’s MX.3 platform, customers now have greater flexibility to select the appropriate release, based on their scope and timelines. To facilitate release deployment further, in 2022 Murex introduced a new offering―upgrade as a service―to shorten client validation activities required for new and existing business solutions. Murex’s service includes automation, maintenance and execution of test activities that replicate clients’ unique MX.3 usage.

Future objectives

Treating and maintaining infrastructure, deployment, configuration and testing as code is essential for outstanding time to market and quality throughout the development cycle. However, tools and skills in these domains are scarce and even more difficult to source when combined with business expertise. To help banks maximize their agility without the burden associated of procuring and managing technical layers, Murex is building new managed services to automate the delivery pipeline with continuous evolution before release into production.

Why they won

Few software firms active in the financial services industry have the resources and engineering expertise of Paris-based Murex. However, Murex’s success and effectiveness as a software house is predicated on much more than its small army of over 1,000 developers and engineers. Its extensive use of agile and DevOps means that new features and functions are tested and released into a production environment at a steady cadence, delivering the latest functionality to users as early as possible, while its flagship MX.3 platform―featuring trading, treasury, risk, and post-trade operations functionality―has a quarterly release cycle, allowing user-firms to select whichever version of the platform they prefer.