In November 2023 Danish fintech Bankdata partnered with Accenture to migrate its capital markets platform, Murex’s MX.3, from on-site to the cloud in order to modernize operations. The migration was achieved within the tight deadline of 15 months and the new cloud platform went live in February 2025.

Bankdata provides technology to eight Danish banks, who are both its owners and customers. The ownership group, which includes Jyske Bank and Sydbank, uses MX.3 for trading products including foreign exchange, derivatives, interest rate and currency swaps, with a daily turnover of approximately $42bn and for treasury, post-trade processing and risk services.

Mogens Sørensen, senior vice president for Digital Banking at Bankdata told Markets Media that it took 15 months between the start of analysing and planning for the transformation with Accenture to the cloud platform going live. However, Bankdata had begun the process two years earlier.

“It was  a big decision for Bankdata and we wanted to do a thorough investigation of our opportunities,” he added.

Bankdata wanted to move from on-premise to a modern cloud infrastructure and also refresh the operating systems and change the underlying database. Sørensen highlighted that the firm was also using a version of Murex that was more than four and a half years old – so there was a huge technical challenge as the software required the equivalent of 16 upgrades without any disruption to their clients’ businesses.

The 15 month deadline was also critical as otherwise Bankdata  would have needed to buy new licenses and also delay the delivery of some business objectives, so Sørensen’s advice is to start the process as early as possible.

“As a technology company we could have done it ourselves but we thought someone else might be a better fit in regards to such a big transformation,” said Sørensen.

As a result, the firm chose Accenture to not just help with the migration, but also because Accenture Applied Technology and Operations for Markets offers financial institutions a range of as-a-service capabilities in front-to-back-office technology and operations processing.

“An important driver in choosing Accenture was scalability and meeting compliance requirements which is becoming a bigger and bigger task,” said Sørensen.”Having a partner with scale and the right capabilities means we don’t have to build them ourselves.”

Tom Syrett, Accenture’s capital markets industry lead for Europe, told Markets Media that the financial services industry, including investment banking and capital markets, is still using core technology which have been installed on-premise.

“They remain the package of choice due to their functional capabilities but they are not upgraded often enough, because this is not the priority in a complex roadmap or budget cycle,” Syrett added.

This causes delays in time to market for new products, challenges in meeting increasing regulatory and compliance requirements and problems when software or infrastructure components go out of service. Syrett argued that the answer is a regular upgrade cycle and a move to a more modern infrastructure, ideally into the cloud.

“We are working on a number of these projects,” added Syrett. “We liked BankData’s ambition and the speed of delivery as Mogens and his team were very courageous.”

Investing in operations and compliance technology was one of the trends identified by Crisil Coalition Greenwich in the consultancy’s Top market structure trends to watch in 2025 report as “making money can’t happen if the foundation is weak.”

“Those that look closely at operations and compliance infrastructures understand the goal is not just cost reduction, but scale, risk reduction and enabling strategic goals,” added the report. “That’s why mainframes are giving way to the cloud, exception alerts to AI monitoring and margin management spreadsheets to portfolio management systems that help optimize collateral.”

Regular updates

Accenture’s cloud-hosted architecture will provide regular system upgrades, environments that can be scaled up and down based on demand, and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements. Syrett said that, ideally, a Murex platform should be upgraded at least once a year, but many clients put them off because they are worried about disrupting their business.

Sørensen added: “Once you get in the cycle of regular upgrades, you won’t notice them and that is our goal. It will be interesting to watch this in the coming year.”

In addition to regular updates improving compliance and security, Sørensen noted that Murex invests heavily in product development every year.  He said: “It’s also about the huge opportunity of unleashing more of the full potential of the software that you are buying.”

For example, if one of Bankdata’s clients wanted to launch a new crypto trading desk then running old software on-premise meant that an upgrade could take 12 to 14 months. Sørensen added: “It is a big difference in time to market.”

Murex is also developing MXopenconnect, which allows firms to get more insights on their business. Sørensen said the next step for Bankdata is to investigate the potential of the upgraded version of Murex.

One benefit that Bankdata has already received is improved ability to monitor their operating environment. Just after the new platform went live, Bankdata could see a potential issue stacking up. The firm could warn clients and ask them for the most convenient time to implement a fix before there was a problem.

“Our clients are getting the great benefits of predictability, cost savings, flexibility and an evergreen platform,” said Sørensen. “We don’t have to think about updating the system and we can focus on our business.”