Financial Services Industry - Incident Detection and Response Alarming Best Practices

Financial Services

Introduction

The financial services industry includes financial services firms, independent software vendors (ISVs), market utilities, and infrastructures that supply essential services to countries around the world. The system provides the main mechanism for paying for goods, services, and financial assets, intermediates between savers and borrowers—channeling savings into investment and insures against and disperses risk.

Common Financial Services Workloads:

Open Banking

Financial institutions are implementing Open Banking platforms to securely expose customer data and core banking functionality via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). This enables trusted third parties to build innovative financial applications and services with user consent.

Banks are modernizing their architecture to comply with data sharing regulations and meet customer demand for digital financial services. They choose Amazon Web Services for the scalability, cost optimization, and data analytics capabilities required to support Open Banking workloads.

Common architectural patterns for these platforms include:

• OAuth 2.0 and OpenID for user authentication and authorization of data access.
• Mutual transport layer security for encrypted communication between providers and consumers.
• API-first infrastructure on an elastic, cloud-native technology stack.
• Near real-time data availability through the exposed APIs.
• Comprehensive logging, monitoring, and auditing to ensure security, compliance, and operational excellence.

Reference Architecture for Open Banking on AWS

Payment System Interface

This architecture shows a microservices-based payment system to handle scale and optimized performance with improved container-based deployment, and using API and event-based models for handling different channels in payment.

• Reference Architecture for Payment System Interface Modernization on AWS

Algorithmic Trading

Financial institutions invest heavily to automate their decision-making for trading and portfolio management. In the US, the majority of trading volume is generated through algorithmic trading.

• Reference Architecture for Algorithmic Trading on AWS

Recommended Metrics to Monitor

We recommend using the below metrics to create and configure alarms based on the above sample architectures and advise to follow the Practices for Observability from the AWS Well-Architected, Operational Excellence Pillar located here.