May 14, 2025

The Importance of Frameworks in Driving Innovation across Custody and Modern Banking Applications

Frameworks are essential components in software development, especially for complex, enterprise-grade applications such as those in banking and financial services. In domains like custodian services, capital market products, and collateral management, frameworks offer a structured foundation that improves feasibility, speeds up development, ensures consistency, and
simplifies maintenance.

What is a Framework?

A framework is a collection of predefined tools, rules, and structures designed to guide the development of software applications. In the context of financial custody and capital markets services, it functions like a blueprint or skeleton, providing a foundation and common functionality that allows developers to concentrate on building unique features for custody
operations, collateral management processes, and post trade processing, without worrying about basic components.

Think of a framework as a reusable template or a set of building blocks that simplifies the development process, accelerates project timelines, and helps ensure that the software is well-organized, consistent, and easier to maintain.

By utilizing a framework, developers can create robust and scalable applications for custody solutions, capital market solutions, and collateral management systems more efficiently, minimizing the risk of errors since many essential functions are already built-in and thoroughly tested. In essence, it embodies the principle of “Build Once, Use Everywhere.”

Why Are Frameworks Essential?

Reusable & Standardized: Frameworks encapsulate common functionalities, allowing developers to avoid reinventing the wheel. They provide a universal foundation that ensures consistent implementation across various projects, including those that support custodial services.
Change Management: A significant advantage of frameworks is the principle of “Change Once, Propagate Everywhere.” This means that modifications made at the framework level automatically reflect across all dependent services, significantly reducing the effort and risks associated with manual updates in custody services in investment banking and collateral management banking.
Faster Development & Scalability: By offering a structured environment, frameworks facilitate rapid development, particularly for bulk processing, asynchronous tasks, and automation. They efficiently handle large volumes of data, enabling the processing of thousands of records or the execution of parallel background tasks with ease, which is crucial for custody services in banking and post trade solutions.
Problem Solving & Standardization: Frameworks standardize the approach to common issues, ensuring uniformity. This simplifies debugging and streamlines future enhancements.

Challenges custodians face: How frameworks help

In the capital market, frequent regulatory changes and continuous market fluctuations pose significant challenges for custodians, especially those offering custodian and depository services. However, having an effective framework in place helps reduce turnaround time in custody operations and makes processes more cost-effective, enabling quicker adaptation to these changes. This is particularly relevant for custodial services finance, securities custody services, and collateral management in investment banking.

The File Upload Framework in eMACH.ai Custody

eMACH.ai Custody’s File Upload Framework is an excellent example of an enterprise solution for custodian services. The various upload configurations implemented through this framework significantly enhance the operational efficiency of the Operations team on a daily basis. It played a crucial role during key testing phases, including System Integration Testing (SIT), User Acceptance Testing (UAT), and Application Mock Runs, ultimately saving valuable time and resources. The framework seamlessly processed thousands of data records in a very short timeframe, which was instrumental in assessing application stability and performance under load, vital for post trade processing workflow.

Key Benefits Observed:

Time Savings: Accelerated testing cycles by automating the processing of large volumes of data, supporting both capital markets advisory and custody solutions.

Reliability and Stability: Ensured consistent data handling and effective error management at scale, which is essential for securities safekeeping and regulatory reporting solutions.
User Experience: Reduced manual efforts for end-users, allowing them to concentrate on their core tasks in custody in investment banking.
Maintenance and Scalability: Simplified updates and scaling due to a standardized, reusable architecture, key for global trade management software.

Framework Design: How It Works in eMACH.ai Custody

The File Upload Framework is an advanced, microservices-based architecture that ensures seamless integration, security, and transaction integrity. eMACH.ai, developed by Intellect, is an intelligent platform rooted in First Principles Thinking. It is designed to assist banks and financial institutions in creating future-proof technological solutions for capital markets consulting, custody services, and collateral management systems in banking. This platform provides the agility, flexibility, and modularity necessary for quick adaptation and growth, all while prioritizing the customer in everything they do.

Architectural Highlights:

Events (E): Manages uploads for various event types, including Masters, Deals, and Corporate Actions.
Microservices (M): Facilitates communication across five distinct microservices, designed for modularity and scalability.
APIs (A): Consists of approximately 200-300 RESTful APIs, enabling flexible and comprehensive operations.
Cloud (C): Hosted on OpenShift, which provides a robust and scalable environment.
Headless (H): Adopts a headless architecture in which the frontend (based on Angular)
and backend services operate independently yet cohesively through REST APIs.

Core Functionality:

Create, Update, Delete Operations: The framework supports CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) actions through flag-driven API calls, with a primary focus on create operations, critical for custody services and capital market products.
File Authorization & Workflow: It implements a Maker-Checker concept, where the uploader (Maker) initiates a file upload, and an authorized reviewer (Checker) approvesit. The framework ensures that only authorized data moves forward, supporting pre-checks and validation.
Pre-Check: A robust and user-friendly feature that validates the file based on Mandatory Checks, Primary Keys, and Length Validation, which must be configured at the table level. The process will halt if the number of errors in the file exceeds a configurable threshold at the table level. After validation, details are logged into an auditing table, including information about the newly created file and the uploaded file, supporting fund custody and post trade management system requirements.
Data Standardization: After approval, the data is standardized (e.g., converted to uppercase for consistency) before being routed to the relevant microservice POD for processing.
Secure Transfer & Storage: Files are transferred securely using SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) and stored in the server infrastructure, ensuring compliance for custody services and collateral management process.
Transaction Integrity: ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) properties are ensured through meticulous commit management to maintain data consistency, supporting post trade management software and custody solutions.
Audit & Logging: Every operation is logged within the microservice context for traceability and audit purposes, vital for regulatory reporting tools and securities custodian requirements.

Technology Stack

Frontend: Angular
Backend: Spring Boot, Turmeric, Spring Batch, Java
Database: Oracle
Cloud Platform: OpenShift

By leveraging frameworks that are tailored for custodian services, capital market solutions, and collateral management systems, financial institutions can deliver more efficient, compliant, and scalable custody services in investment banking and collateral management banking, ensuring operational excellence in a rapidly evolving financial landscape.

Author: