Securing High-Volume Trade Settlement Through Core System Stabilization

Client Overview

A major financial services firm was facing escalating performance degradation inside its core trading platform. Slow reports, high CPU and I/O usage, and unpredictable processing times were creating operational delays and customer dissatisfaction. These issues threatened platform reliability—critical for a business handling time-sensitive trading and compliance workflows.

The organisation engaged Simple Logic IT Pvt. Ltd. to stabilise and optimise its 8TB+ SQL Server database environment running on SQL Server 2016 and Windows Server 2019.

As a leading, high-volume stockbroker, the client’s reputation and compliance relied entirely on the flawless execution of their core back-office applications, responsible for processing trade settlements, regulatory reporting, and End-of-Day (EOD) procedures.

The Challenge

The client was facing a mounting crisis of instability in their critical Class Application. The system, which handles millions of daily transactions, was suffering from frequent timeouts, sporadic system exceptions, and alarming instability. They were experiencing 1–2 application restarts per day and daily job failures. This required constant manual intervention, pushing risk to unacceptable levels and jeopardising their ability to meet stringent regulatory deadlines for trade settlement.

Previous quick-fix solutions focused on rebooting servers rather than addressing the root cause: inefficient database queries and resource-heavy application logic.

Objectives

• Eliminate daily failures, ensuring 100% successful EOD job completion.
• Achieve a significant, measurable reduction in the execution time of critical regulatory processes (STT, Valan, Import Trade).
• Dramatically stabilise the system environment to zero-out unplanned downtime and manual restarts.

The Solution

We implemented a surgical, phased Database and Application Performance Engineering strategy. Instead of immediately recommending expensive hardware upgrades, we focused our efforts on unlocking the existing infrastructure’s potential. Our approach involved:

• Surgical SQL Tuning: Identified and optimised bottleneck SQL queries across the MSSQL database.
• Object Tuning: Executed data-driven structural changes, including essential indexes and refined parameter handling for optimal data retrieval.
• Process Refactoring: Analysed application logic for key back-office modules and corrected non-standard data approaches causing high CPU utilisation.

Implementation Process

Our implementation was structured into a rigorous eight-week Phase 1 cycle, focusing on eight mission-critical modules:

• Weeks 1–2 (Diagnosis & Benchmarking): Established baseline metrics and performed a full health check of the database and application servers.
• Weeks 3–6 (Deep Optimisation): Carried out iterative tuning, focusing on query plan optimisation and index application on production replicas before deployment.
• Weeks 7–8 (Validation & Sign-Off): Conducted benchmarking to validate gains, executed outside core trading hours with precise, risk-averse procedures.

Results & Outcomes

The focused optimisation delivered massive, verifiable performance uplift, transforming risk into resilience:

• Daily Job Failures: Eliminated.
• Application Restarts: Reduced from 1–2 per day to rarely, maximum once per week.
• System Exceptions/Timeouts: Never observed post-optimisation.

Key Learnings & Insights

Success was driven by our refusal to treat high CPU utilisation as purely a hardware problem. This project confirmed that inefficient database design is the most significant source of performance drag and operational risk in high-volume environments. A surgical approach to SQL optimisation offers the highest ROI, turning complex system instability into measurable, high-impact success.

Conclusion

This engagement converted a critical weakness into a core strength. The client now operates with a faster, more reliable back-office system that can scale confidently alongside their aggressive growth trajectory. Simple Logic continues to support them, ensuring these performance gains are sustained through ongoing reviews.