Why do ambitious Asian Banks need a top-priority trading platform health check?

It’s tempting to assume: “The platform’s working… more or less.” But beneath the surface, legacy code, excessive customization, third-party dependencies, and poor observability cost banks dearly, through outages, inefficiencies, audit issues, and missed opportunities.

For Heads of Infrastructure in Asia’s banking sector, a proactive trading platform health check is not optional, it’s a strategic imperative.

Clear insight is non-negotiable

When you leave platform issues unaddressed, visibility gaps grow. These lead to:

• Increased operational risk: a single incident might derail trading flows, regulatory compliance, or client trust.
• Transformation paralysis: modernization initiatives stall because the underlying platform is uncertain.
• Spiraling costs: more resources spent reacting than innovating.
• Competitive disadvantage: nimble fintechs move faster; modern banks that delay are left behind.
• Regulatory exposure: unclear data lineage, weak exception handling, insufficient auditing make compliance expensive.
• Inefficiency: support teams in reactive mode, duplicated effort across siloed or customized modules.

Your financial forecasts might look solid, but you could still be flying blind, unable to prioritize or justify change. Without knowing the operational health of your platform, how can you be confident it will support your bank’s ambitions? Is it scalable enough? Can it integrate seamlessly with AI, cloud infrastructure, real-time analytics, and evolving regulatory requirements?

What is a trading platform health check?

A trading platform health check is a short, expert-led diagnostic engagement. In about 1–3 months, you get:

• a fixed-price, low-risk assessment
• objective identification of platform risks, performance bottlenecks, and areas of wasted resources
• a baseline for modernization, cloud migration or functional upgrades

Typical areas covered include: production support readiness, architecture, customization levels, cloud readiness, regulatory compliance, deployment and release practices, observability, etc.

Is the production support team up to scratch?

Some of the questions a health check helps answer:

• Do you have the right skills, teams, and operating procedures to extract maximum value?
• Are long-term improvements (refactoring, reducing custom code, improving stability) being actioned or just firefighting?
• If you run multiple platforms (front to back to risk), are support teams shared or duplicated (which increases cost)?

Ready for cloud lift-off?

Assess whether you are ready to embrace cloud, hybrid cloud, or more as-a-service infrastructure:

• Is the architecture modular and designed for scalability and migration?
• Are workflows and procedures aligned to gain full cloud benefits?
• Do you have strong visibility into storage and compute usage (and associated costs)?
• Is there a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud strategy to support resilience, business continuity, and regulatory demands?
• Would adopting a fully managed or platform/ecosystem model (SaaS, PaaS) yield benefits?

Adding depth: how Murex and Upskills powered by VISEO data strengthen the Case

Murex: a real-world example

• The Murex MX.3 platform is used by more than 60,000 daily users in over 60 countries across trading, treasury, risk, and post-trade operations. 
• It supports cross-asset functions and regulatory readiness, helping clients meet evolving compliance standards whilst managing risk and IT cost. 
• With MX.3, banks have access to extensive out-of-the-box functionality, high configurability, and a rich connectivity framework. 
• Additionally, Murex’s MXGO solution offers a packaged treasury and trading core that can be parameterized locally and be deployed rapidly (in months), helping banks accelerate transformation with lower risk. 

These characteristics mean that for many banks using or considering Murex, a trading platform health check focused on their MX.3 deployment can uncover specific areas: are they under-using built-in features; is their customization causing excessive technical debt; how well are they handling regulatory changes (eg. IBOR, XVA, collateral & margin rules); and how feasible is a move to more cloud-enabled or flexible deployment models.

Upskills: capabilities & trading platforms expertise

• Upskills is a global consulting firm, founded in 2009 by former Murex managers, with deep domain expertise in capital markets and IT solutions for financial organisations. 
• They have more than 100 experts operating across Asia and Europe, delivering functional and technical knowledge especially around trading, risk, treasury, post-trade and regulatory software. 
• Upskills works especially with Murex MX.3 implementations, helping banks configure, optimize and extend the platform, align it with regulatory demands, improve performance, reduce cost of customization, and enhance observability. 

Upskills’ specific capabilities in trading platforms

With respect to trading platforms, Upskills brings:

• Platform configuration & optimization for MX.3 to reduce technical debt, improve stability, and better exploit out-of-box features.
• Performance diagnostics & tuning: Identifying bottlenecks in front-office, risk, and post-trade workflows; optimizing analytics, connectivity, and product libraries.
• Regulatory readiness support: Ensuring data lineage, exception handling, audit paths, compliance with IBOR transition, XVA, margin, as well as local regulatory regimes.
• Cloud migration readiness / modernization roadmaps: Assess existing architecture, identify dependencies, plan migrations or hybrid deployments, test for operational overheads.
• Support / production team effectiveness enhancement: Skills assessment, training, improvement of support workflows, incident resolution metrics, and scaling support capability.

These strengths make Upskills a strong partner when a bank decides to undergo a trading platform health check.

Pulling it all together: the business case for a trading platform health check

Drawing on VISEO’s and partners’ experience across platforms, operations and consulting, here are key finals thoughts:

• Match the health check scope to your vendor landscape and product strategy (e.g. if you use Murex MX.3, include configuration and customization levels as well as product-vendor roadmap alignment).
• Commercial terms matter: ensure the health check is fixed-price, fast to start, and its cost can be offset against future work if you engage further modernization.
• Deliver tangible outputs: a report with risks, opportunities, quick wins, future roadmap, and a structured walkthrough with stakeholders. No unnecessary access overhead; the goal is clarity and pragmatism.

A properly conducted trading platform health check gives you back clarity, confidence and control, letting your bank invest in innovation rather than firefighting legacy issues.