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Enhancing Observability and Performance for a Global Financial Leader

Discover how we reduced latency by over 50%, cut transaction failures by 73%, and accelerated incident resolution for a major financial institution—using New Relic to deliver unified observability across hybrid cloud environments.

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Client Overview

A global enterprise financial institution with a vast digital presence, handling millions of transactions daily across multiple geographies. The firm offers banking, investment, and insurance services through a hybrid cloud infrastructure that supports high-frequency trading, risk management, and consumer banking applications.

Enhancing Observability

Challenge

The financial institution faced severe performance degradation in its core banking and trading applications, resulting in intermittent service disruptions. Key issues included:

High Latency & Transaction Failures

Average transaction response times had increased by 40%, leading to a sharp rise in transaction failures, affecting high-value trades.

Lack of End-to-End Visibility

The institution relied on fragmented monitoring tools that provided siloed insights into infrastructure, application performance, and security events but lacked a unified observability approach.

Incident Resolution Delays

The Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) exceeded 90 minutes, while the Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) was above 4 hours, leading to significant revenue loss and regulatory compliance risks.

Cloud Migration Complexity

As part of its ongoing digital transformation, the firm was migrating critical workloads from on-premise data centres to AWS and Azure, creating additional performance bottlenecks.

Solution

Bion Consulting, as an experienced New Relic partner, conducted a comprehensive observability assessment to diagnose performance bottlenecks and optimise system reliability.

Step 1: Observability Maturity Assessment
  • Mapped out all critical applications and dependencies across hybrid cloud infrastructure.
  • Identified observability gaps in microservices, Kubernetes clusters, and serverless components.
  • Assessed existing monitoring tools and their limitations in providing full-stack observability.
Step 2: Unified Observability Strategy with New Relic
  • End-to-End Instrumentation: Deployed New Relic APM across Java-based trading platforms, .NET-based banking applications, and mobile APIs to provide real-time performance insights.
  • Distributed Tracing: Implemented New Relic Distributed Tracing to track transaction journeys across services, reducing debugging time by 60%.
  • Infrastructure Monitoring: Integrated New Relic Infrastructure to monitor Kubernetes clusters, AWS EC2 instances, and Azure VMs for resource utilisation patterns.
  • Log Management & Anomaly Detection: Enabled New Relic Logs and AI-powered anomaly detection to correlate logs with performance events, accelerating root cause analysis.
Step 3: Automated Alerting & Remediation
  • Configured proactive alerting policies using New Relic Alerts to trigger notifications for transaction latency spikes and anomalous API failures.
  • Integrated New Relic with incident management tools (ServiceNow & PagerDuty) for automated ticket creation and faster resolution workflows.
  • Implemented auto-scaling policies based on New Relic’s insights, ensuring resource allocation dynamically adjusted to traffic spikes.
Solution Implementation
Over a 16-week phased deployment, Bion Consulting executed a structured observability enhancement plan:
  • Weeks 1-8: Full-stack observability setup and instrumentation of critical services.
  • Weeks 9-13: Performance benchmarking, anomaly detection fine-tuning, and distributed tracing rollout.
  • Weeks 13-16: Incident response automation, alert optimisation, and final reporting to stakeholders.

Results

Post-implementation, the financial institution observed significant improvements:
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Reduction in Latency

Average response time dropped by 55%, from 2.8s to 1.25s, ensuring seamless trading execution.

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Decrease in Transaction Failures

Failed transactions were reduced by 73%, directly impacting revenue recovery.

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Faster Incident Resolution

MTTD decreased to 15 minutes (from 90 minutes), while MTTR was reduced to 50 minutes (from 4+ hours).

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Enhanced Compliance & Security

Improved visibility into audit logs and security anomalies, ensuring compliance with financial regulations (e.g., GDPR, PCI-DSS).

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Optimised Cloud Resource Utilisation

By identifying over-provisioned compute instances and optimising auto-scaling policies, cloud costs were reduced by 20%.

Conclusion

By leveraging New Relic’s full-stack observability capabilities, Bion Consulting enabled the financial institution to resolve issues faster, enhance performance, and optimise costs. This transformation improved operational resilience and strengthened customer trust by delivering a seamless banking and trading experience.

This case study reflects key challenges and solutions relevant to:

  • Financial observability solutions
  • Enterprise application performance monitoring
  • New Relic for banking and financial services
  • Cloud migration performance challenges
  • Optimising trading platform latency
  • Incident resolution for financial institutions
  • Full-stack observability for regulated industries
  • AWS & Azure performance monitoring

As an AWS Advanced Partner with DevOps Competency, Bion Consulting continues to drive excellence in observability for enterprise financial clients, ensuring they remain ahead in an increasingly complex digital landscape.

Explore how Bion Consulting can elevate your observability strategy. Contact Us