BST Awards 2021: Best use of the Agile methodology—Murex

OVERVIEW

The MX continuous delivery suite is designed to allow development teams to implement new features and ship updates into production quickly. 

Typical user-firms: Murex targets all its customers using its MX.3 platform, including hedge funds, asset owners, asset managers, central banks, investment banks and clearinghouses. It support all hosting models: software-as-a-serivice (SaaS); on-premises; and public, private and hybrid clouds.

Murex’s global headcount grew 7% to 2,400 employees by the end of 2020. It opened its 18th office in Nicosia, Cyprus, increased its Latin American staff by 60% and doubled its Canadian staff. More than 100 clients are using Murex’s IBOR solution, while more than 30% are already using the cloud to operate MX.3.

Murex was ranked the 4th best employer to work for in France by Glassdoor (2020), and the company invested more than €107 million in R&D during 2020. It has invested more €1 billion in R&D over the past 10 years.

WHAT’S NEW

Murex has added MXpipeline, a tool designed to automate, build, deploy and test new features, to the GitLab DevOps platform. It has reduced development infrastructure costs by using on-cloud elasticity provisioning of the MX.3 configuration development and testing infrastructure. It now offers Microsoft SQL and open source database PostgreSQL, both supported on AWS and Azure, and it has deployed the Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) methodology as a new way of operating MX.3. All its greenfield implementations are now using CI/CD and it is rolling out CI/CD for brownfield sites. Finally, Murex has started its transition to Swift ISO 20022 for all its clients. 

WHAT’S TO COME

Murex sees capital markets firms’ digital journeys as a growth opportunity for it over the next 12 months. It will focus on optimizing and reducing the cost of implementing MX.3 in greenfield sites and introducing an Upgrade-as-a-Service (UaaS) offering, allowing clients a minimum one upgrade per year to MX.3’s latest release. The firm will be involved in all production activities, allowing clients to reduce their use of specialized skillsets and simplify their IT domains. It will continue to promote the CI/CD methodology among its clients and it will shift intensive hardware usage processes/functions to the cloud (such as VaR calculations) in order to benefit from cloud elasticity and the pay-as-you-go model.

WHY THEY WON

The Agile development methodology including DevOps and continuous integration and delivery of updates (CI/CD) is the only practical means of massively reducing time to market for new functionality and ensuring that everything from discreet functionality to entire platforms remain current and fit for purpose. Murex’s Agile strategy reflects these qualities, a strategy that has delivered significant value for its clients and ensured a steady clip of new signings for the Paris-based software house.