Case Study: National Bank of Canada achieves faster, scalable post-trade analysis and optimized trading operations with Amazon Web Services

National Bank of Canada - Customer Case Study

National Bank of Canada’s Global Equity Derivatives Group (GED) manages exchange‑traded securities and was challenged by rapidly growing trade and quote data that its on‑premises hardware and relational databases could not scale. The team needed to process both structured and unstructured data (including large log files), perform historical back‑testing, and answer far more analytical questions than their previous system allowed.

GED deployed Cloudera Hadoop on Amazon Web Services and implemented TickSmith’s TickVault, using EC2, RDS, and S3, and was operational in under two weeks. The solution scales to hundreds of terabytes and supports 10 years of historical data, reduced data‑manipulation from days to about a minute and post‑trade analysis from weeks to hours, enabling better trading decisions, improved customer execution and increased revenue, with plans to extend the platform to compliance and risk management.

National Bank of Canada

Pascal Bergeron

Director of Algorithmic Trading