Swissquote gains agility and control with Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer
Online bank standardizes its database environment, dynamically scales capacity for market-driven demand, and keeps data inside its own data centers in Switzerland.
Switzerland | Financial Services
“Ensuring that data remains inside Swissquote data centers, which we operate ourselves, was strategic. With Cloud@Customer, we have a similar deployment in our main data center, disaster recovery site, and preproduction environments, which helps us ensure the highest level of availability for our services.”
Swissquote is the digital banking leader in Switzerland, providing online financial market services to more than one million clients. During peak days, as many as 250,000 users directly interact with its banking and trading services, making latency and availability critical. While core banking workloads involve predictable but resource-intensive batch processing, market events can trigger sudden usage spikes.
After years of strong growth, Swissquote wanted to modernize its internally developed and fragmented database environment that included Oracle Database Appliance systems and commodity hardware. The bank needed a more consistent architecture that could support future growth, improve resilience, simplify operations, control costs, and remain aligned with licensing and regulatory requirements, including keeping sensitive data inside its company-owned data centers in Switzerland. That requirement, combined with its other considerations, made many traditional public cloud and SaaS deployment models unsuitable.
Why Swissquote chose Oracle
The bank selected Oracle Exadata Database Service on Cloud@Customer to bring cloud-style database capabilities into its own data centers while giving them access to Oracle Exadata performance, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure automation, and a cloud consumption model.
The solution also helped Swissquote standardize across its main data center, disaster recovery site, and preproduction environments. That consistency is important for a platform supporting client-facing trading services, core banking, internal services, and operational teams.
Dynamic scaling helps Swissquote handle sudden increases in client-facing trading workloads. Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer allows Swissquote to adjust CPU resources almost in real time, increasing or decreasing capacity without database restarts or a direct impact on availability. For more predictable banking workloads, such as Temenos T24, the bank can plan and schedule capacity in advance for known peaks, such as nightly batch processing.
Oracle Customer Success Services and Oracle Consulting supported the migration program with governance, guidance, and technical expertise, working alongside Swissquote's skilled database team.
Results
Swissquote now has a more standardized, modern, and uniformly managed Oracle Database platform for mission-critical banking and trading workloads. The bank can operate with more consistent patching, security, and lifecycle management across environments while continuing to keep data under local control in Switzerland.
The ability to scale capacity dynamically helps Swissquote avoid maintaining excess infrastructure capacity. Instead, the bank can respond rapidly to workload spikes, optimize resource usage, and continue delivering a responsive client experience while aligning infrastructure costs with business needs.
While standardization has been the most significant overall benefit, the bank observed performance gains in several areas. As Guillaume Hayoz, head of data management, explains, “With our new platform, we can now say that our systems are up to date, patched, secured, and managed in a uniform way. That is a major advantage.”
By relying on Oracle for areas such as platform installation, hardening, maintenance, and component replacement, the company’s database teams can spend more time improving services for employees and clients. As more teams see measurable outcomes from the system, Swissquote is evaluating additional Oracle Database workloads for Exadata Cloud@Customer where the business value and total cost of ownership are clear.
Partners
Swissquote’s database team led the migration with support from Oracle Customer Success Services and Oracle Consulting Services.
About the company
Headquartered in Gland, Switzerland, Swissquote is a Swiss online bank focused on trading, investing, and digital banking services. The company is known for combining Swiss banking stability with digital innovation and for developing online platforms that give clients direct access to financial market services.