Case Studies

Securing Global Trading Operations for OTC Global Holdings

Financial Services

Services involved

  • Cyber Security, Business Strategy, Managed IT

Get in touch

Book a straightforward, no-obligation discovery call with a senior member of the Cloudscape team.

Book a call

The Client

OTC Global Holdings (OTCGH) is the world’s largest independent institutional broker of commodities, covering financial and physical instruments across energy, refined products, freight and related markets. Established in 2007, the firm serves several hundred institutional clients, including a significant proportion of the Global Fortune 500, through a portfolio of specialist brokerage businesses and its hybrid voice and electronic execution platform.

The group’s international footprint includes two offices in the City of London alongside operations in Dubai, Singapore and Geneva, with further presence across the United States. Its London entities operate under FCA authorisation, with parallel obligations to regulators in the UAE, Singapore, Switzerland and the United States, placing exceptional demands on trade capture, communications recording, records retention and operational resilience.

Our Role

Cloudscape has been OTCGH’s official Managed Service Provider since 2012, appointed as the firm established its London operation. For almost fifteen years we have held complete responsibility for IT across both London offices, together with strategic and management oversight of the Dubai, Singapore and Geneva offices.

Our engagement combines three things: a dedicated service desk delivered both onsite and 24/7; end-to-end delivery of infrastructure, trading platform and office relocation projects; and a full virtual CTO service that sets and governs technology strategy at leadership level. We operate as OTCGH’s IT department rather than as a supplier to it.

Challenges

  • Meeting FCA and international regulatory obligations for trade capture, voice and electronic communications recording, retention and surveillance across multiple jurisdictions
  • Zero tolerance for downtime or latency on the electronic and voice trading platforms that carry the firm’s revenue
  • A relentless and escalating cyber threat directed at financial market infrastructure and the people who operate it
  • Growth by acquisition, bringing disparate IT estates, identities and security postures into the group
  • Multiple large London office moves, plus the establishment of new trading operations in Dubai and Singapore
  • Fragmented technology decision-making and unclear investment priorities as the business scaled internationally

Solutions

  • A compliant-by-design architecture with resilient voice and electronic trade recording, tamper-evident retention aligned to MiFID II and MAR requirements, rapid eDiscovery and audit-ready evidence maintained for regulator and client due diligence
  • A highly resilient trading platform design with no single point of failure, migrated from on-premise infrastructure to cloud without the loss of a single trading hour, with low-latency connectivity giving brokers seamless access across markets
  • A best-of-breed Zero Trust architecture built on identity-centric access, phishing-resistant MFA, conditional access, device compliance, privileged access management and network segmentation, underpinned by a 24/7 SOC with SIEM and Managed Detection & Response
  • A repeatable acquisition integration playbook covering technical due diligence, tenant and domain consolidation, identity and data migration, and rapid enforcement of the group security baseline across acquired endpoints and users
  • Cloudscape project managing every fit-out from concept to occupation with responsibility for all contractors, covering trading floor design, structured cabling, resilient LAN/WAN, AV, dealerboards and platform commissioning, with brokers trading from day one
  • A full virtual CTO service providing a rolling three-year technology roadmap, quarterly business reviews, budget forecasting, vendor governance and board-level risk reporting

Business Impact

  • Trading platform availability 99.99%+ sustained across electronic and voice trading platforms during market hours
  • Trading hours lost to change Zero across the cloud migration, every London office move and both new office builds
  • Priority 1 response Under 10 minutes against a 15-minute contractual SLA
  • Ticket volume per user Down 41% over three years as recurring root causes were engineered out
  • Audit and due diligence No IT-related findings raised at regulatory audit or in institutional client due diligence
  • Infrastructure operating cost Reduced by approximately 30% following decommission of the on-premise estate
  • Global operating model Five offices across three continents supported under a single service and security model
Client testimonial

Don’t just take our word for it

“Cloudscape have been part of this business since the day we opened in London. They understand that if a platform is down we are not trading and in almost fifteen years they have not let that happen. They have taken us from a server room to the cloud, built and opened offices for us in Geneva, Dubai and Singapore and given us a security posture our clients and our regulators can have confidence in.”

Joe Kelly

CEO, OTC Global Holdings

Other Case Studies

Property Services

Cloud Transformation for a London Housing Association

Read more
Charity / Not-for-profit

Modern Workplace Transformation for a Children’s Charity

Read more
Design/Creative

Delivering a New London Studio for a Leading Interior Design Practice

Read more
See all case studies
Contact us

Ready to simplify your IT? Book a free discovery call

We’ll review your setup, highlight quick wins, and answer your questions.

Book a call
Secret Link