Amazon Web Services Partners with Waton Securities International, Enabling Digital Transformation of Global Brokerage Firms with FinTech Solutions

NEW YORK, Jan. 20, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — In January 2023, Amazon Web Services (known as “AWS”) announced the strategic partnership with Waton Securities International (known as “Waton”) to launch a safe, simple, compliant and robust one-stop FinTech solution for global brokerage firms and financial institutions.

Established in 1989, Waton, which holds Type 1/4/5/9 licenses issued by the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission, has accumulated rich operating experience in the brokerage business over the past three decades. As a licensed brokerage firm and a FinTech solution provider, Waton leverages on its remarkable services track record and resources across the value chain, to bring category-defining technology solutions from China to the world and to revitalize traditional brokerage firms with a powerful integrated digital transformation solution. Till today, Waton has served more than a dozen institutional clients around the world, with its proprietary Broker Cloud solution (Brokerage x SaaS).

Waton’s Broker Cloud combines brokerage functions with FinTech SaaS solutions. Waton provides licensed brokerage firms with sophisticated one-stop execution and clearing services for major stock markets and asset management solutions, on the other hand, Waton provides an integrated one-stop solution for those financial institutions without IT capabilities or middle/back office infrastructure to launch their trading platforms and run brokerage operations digitally.

Waton leverages on its in-depth understanding of the brokerage industry and value chain, to build a holistic development system with comprehensive product features and robust information technology infrastructure, which can reduce the development cycle from several months to 2-4 weeks and the development cost by more than 40%. Broker Cloud covers all functions for all kinds of scenarios in a customized manner, and directly addresses the biggest obstacles and hurdles in brokerage platform development and deployment. In addition, Waton has built in automated risk management AI in our Broker Cloud platform, which helps clients identify, monitor and manage various type of risks, and fulfil regulatory requirements.

High efficiency, cost effectiveness, all-roundness, robustness and compliance are the main comparative advantages of Waton’s Broker Cloud services, combined with Waton’s solid experience in the major financial centers as well as the emerging markets. The strategic partnership formed between AWS and Waton is built on Waton’s track record and sector expertise leveraged with AWS’s access for global product offering. With the strategic partnership, Broker Cloud clients can access global cloud infrastructure and services applicable to different scenarios, including customer management system, order management system, account management system, market quotes and news information, KYC/AML, transaction payment, and risk management. Furthermore, AWS offers the world’s most stringent security requirements, and ensures compliance through unified data access and security governance. This allows cost-efficient scaling and fully-integrated delivery of front, middle and back-end services. Broker Cloud would be a truly data-driven integrated platform with trading, investment research, risk management, and operational systems to deliver the best brokerage B2B services to global clients simply, securely and efficiently.

Waton’s Broker Cloud runs on Amazon EC2, Amazon Web Services’ reliable, scalable, elastic computing service, to enable front-end, middle-end and back-end service integration. And it would utilize Application Load Balancer to build a highly adaptable structure, to provide safe, compliant, and timely applications to Broker Cloud clients. Market quotations and news feed are crucial public data in the brokerage industry, which requires the Broker Cloud to be able to deal with real-time processing and distribution of information to clients. Waton’s Broker Cloud adopts Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) to build a fully managed, highly reliable and secured data streaming services. In addition to market quotations and news feed, the platform also covers log collection and big data processing. AWS provides the most comprehensive set of databases to help Broker Cloud grow and innovate rapidly in a cost-efficient manner, to meet different demand scenarios.

Kai Zhou, CEO of Waton Securities International, said that digital transformation and upgrading of traditional brokerage platforms is an inevitable trend. Technological advancement will help reduce the marginal cost and deliver better services to more clients, and FinTech unicorns will be created in the wave of digitalization. We firmly believe that Waton Securities International, with 33 years of history and service experience in the brokerage industry, partnering with AWS’ strong infrastructure and technology advantages, will further the advancement and development of the whole brokerage industry.

In the future, the demand for digital transformation in the brokerage industry will continue to rise, and the integration of big data and FinTech into applications will be faster. Waton Securities International’s in-depth sector expertise and category-defining FinTech capabilities, together with Amazon Web Services’ global cloud service platform, will empower more market participants to break through existing barriers and deliver best-in-kind customer services to global users efficiently and effectively, while creating more value-add through tailored digital solutions.