Serverless Architecture for High Performance Financial Modelling

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Overview

This Financial Services customer specialises in matching well-structured risks with efficient sources of capital to help companies manage the risks of operating in a volatile and uncertain world, including climate change, natural hazards like wildfires and hurricanes, cyber threats, and significant societal upheaval.

fourTheorem have been a highly valued innovation partner for us. Super smart people with an in-depth knowledge of AWS. Their high calibre people are adept at applying the appropriate technology to solve complex business problems. We don't see enough of that in the market. An ability to attract that level of talent is a real differentiator.

The Challenge

The core process for understanding a portfolio is the Risk Rollup — a model that simulates events such as earthquakes for property reinsurance to provide a consolidated view of risk and inform key business decisions. This system was previously run on-premises and, due to rapid business growth, faced significant challenges:

  • The system could only support 2–3 portfolio rollups per day, each taking up to 10 hours.
  • Deal analytics were executed on the same compute cluster, creating resource contention.
  • There was an increasing need to run multiple isolated workloads to simulate various market exposure scenarios.
  • The total cost of ownership (TCO) for the system was high.

The Solution

The customer partnered with fourTheorem to fully migrate the Risk Rollup process to AWS. The solution involved re-architecting the system to take advantage of serverless computing and AWS managed services.

The engagement began with a discovery and design phase, followed by a six-week proof of concept (POC) that delivered a working rollup process, reducing run time to just one hour.

This POC was then expanded and integrated into upstream and downstream workflows. The new process was highly scalable, using containers and AWS Lambda functions to support both batch processing and real-time, on-demand analytics.

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The Outcome

Execution Time

Compute resource scales in line with business needs. 

Parallel Processing

Remove resource contention issues and capacity planning. 

Codebase Reduction

Fewer bugs, less maintenance, reduced TCO.

Cost Flexibility

Transparent insights into costs; optimise price/performance and only pay for what you use. 

Innovation

The technology evolves with you, making obsolescence a thing of the past.