Technical challenges of a cloud-native, consolidated, globally distributed trade ledger

Trading may seem like a relatively simple activity, but it quickly becomes a challenging task when performed on a global scale, with non-trivial financial products, regulatory requirements. Especially with mandatory risk management practices in place. Since at least 1990's global investment banking business is supported by computer systems, which have grown in size and complexity to meet requirements emerging from changing business and legal environment and growing scale. With the increasing attractiveness of cloud offerings, especially in the area of databases & networking, the projects of moving trading to the cloud emerged. The core piece of any cloud-native trading solution is a ledger, which serves the purpose of the primary source of financial obligations of the bank. This talk is intended for anyone, who would like to learn a bit about the business background of fintech systems, the kinds of technical challenges that are associated with building them, specifically in a cloud environment. The emphasis will be put on construction of a Java-based trade ledger (not to be confused with DTL). Example technical solutions using Google Cloud Spanner will be shown.