BNY Mellon transforms data storage, resiliency, and scalability with Azure Database for PostgreSQL

BNY Mellon is a global financial services firm that helps its customers invest and service their financial assets and manages large quantities of critical data on their behalf. An important component of the company’s cloud-native Data Vault data management solution, a self-managed database environment, was less efficient than it could be, and the company wanted to invest in new technology to enhance its reliability and agility.

“The data that flows through our platform is mission-critical to our clients,” says Fernando Mesa, Chief Information Officer and Head of Engineering for Data and Analytics at BNY Mellon. “Our services must be highly resilient to meet the scale and availability of our multitenant architecture.” 

Data Vault ingests and connects clients’ data, ultimately providing them with greater insight into their data in near real time. “Our clients are trusting us with their data, and as a leading data management platform for asset and wealth managers, asset owners, and market infrastructure players, it’s imperative that our technology is resilient and scalable to support their growth in new regions and asset classes while making information more actionable to users,” says Steve Taylor, Head of Product for Data and Analytics at BNY Mellon. 

Migrating to Azure Database for PostgreSQL in nine months

BNY Mellon worked closely with Microsoft to enhance online transaction processing (OLTP), the transactional components of Data Vault. The company chose to build its solution using Microsoft Azure technology because it had an existing relationship with Microsoft and valued its experience in financial services. “We as a company decided in the early stages of our journey to the cloud to work with companies that had a strong presence in financial services,” says Mesa. “Microsoft is one of those. We got the best of both worlds—a strong cloud presence that maps to the financial services industry.”

The team at BNY Mellon wanted to improve and simplify its self-managed database environment with a fully managed and more efficient, flexible, and resilient database technology that would better fit its microservices architecture. The company hoped to create an easily scalable OLTP database and decided that Azure Database for PostgreSQL would meet its need for a fully managed database and scale with its analytics warehouse. BNY Mellon’s migration to PostgreSQL took only nine months, in part because of the team’s daily interaction with and support from its Microsoft team.

During its database conversion, BNY Mellon further improved its microservices architecture for tasks such as metadata management, event processing, and other transactional workloads. To do so, the company used PostgreSQL's capability to adapt to varying workloads and tune in to each service’s needs. The ability to customize features to suit specific business needs helped the team build a truly cohesive environment that is easily adaptable to new client requirements. “During our journey, we realized that we did not want to build a solution that only addresses the needs of today; rather, we wanted to create a platform that has the key building blocks in place so that new features can be built as needed,” says Mesa.

Accelerating innovation and its clients’ digital transformations

As BNY Mellon deployed its new PostgreSQL database, employees could use the time they previously spent with its self-managed database to innovate within Azure and create new solutions for client needs. “Microsoft Azure allows our team to innovate faster in areas such as data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning,” says Eduardo Perez, Head of Architecture and AI for Data and Analytics at BNY Mellon. “Our ability to move quickly and adjust to the needs of our engineers and the services they are building is enhanced by the PostgreSQL’s flexibility and breadth of capabilities.”

BNY Mellon ultimately wants to make sure that its platform enhances the customer experience. “It’s about how we do more for our clients. Our focus is on innovation to improve their experience on our platform,” says Taylor. 

Solving real-world business problems in an agile architecture

BNY Mellon’s strategic alliance with Microsoft has led to one of the most innovative data platforms in the financial industry, and it plans to keep incorporating new services and solutions. 

The company knows that as requirements evolve in the global marketplace, its overarching architecture needs to be flexible and agile in deploying new services and solutions. “By using key technology from Microsoft and other innovative cloud partners, we have created a solution that combines innovation, resiliency, and scale,” says Mesa. “The partnership with Microsoft will also help us deliver innovation in AI on top of the Vault’s rock-solid foundation.”