Case Study: IOOF Holdings achieves near‑instant online trade processing (days to seconds) with MySQL

IOOF Cuts Time to Complete Online Trades from Days to Seconds with MySQL

IOOF Holdings Ltd., an ASX top-200 Australian financial services group with more than AU$100 billion under management, 600,000 clients, and about 1,000 advisers, needed a simple, cost-effective, high-performing database that could scale with growth. The firm sought a reliable, secure web interface for retirement accounts and trading, faster handling of large daily transactions (fee calculations, account inquiries), and tools to detect potential issues and security vulnerabilities.

IOOF implemented MySQL (including MySQL Cluster), going live three months after starting in 2010, and achieved major improvements: share-trading times dropped from days to seconds, development of new database environments fell from hours to minutes, and IT and trading costs were reduced. The solution delivered high availability and self-healing protection, an operational dashboard for early issue detection, supported growth after acquisitions, improved adviser and investor access, and lowered hardware and energy requirements — all on time and on budget.

IOOF Holdings

Andrew Todd

CIO