Saxo Bank is an online bank with customers in 160 countries. We trade over 20,000 different products and handle over 100,000 transactions per day. The record to date is 689,000 accounted transactions on a single day.
In addition to all those transactions, we also have to administer a large number of open orders. These include orders given on special conditions (e.g. a certain price must be obtained). When things are busy, we can have up to 60,000 open orders, which our systems have to constantly monitor and perform in order to meet the customer’s conditions.
We have two data centres to control the traffic, orders, transactions etc. all over the world. Both are located in Denmark. Data traffic is already considerable, and growing rapidly. The existing business as well as new products in the pipeline mean that we expect to update over 100,000 new prices per second within a couple of years, and perform over one million transactions on a busy day, with a turnover in excess of DKK 400 billion on such a day.
That makes heavy demands of our IT systems. Over the last three years, we invested over a billion DKK in our IT, and this year, we are investing a further half a billion.
We have 315 people employed in our IT functions in Copenhagen, London, Kiev and New Delhi. About 100 of these are consultants from specialised suppliers, who use their niche expertise to customise software for us.
We provide our platform and software to financial institutions all over the world. We also supply prices, information etc. and handle the transactions their customers make on their behalf.
We believe that our software, platform and know-how are the decisive competitive parameters for the future. Hence the title. It’s all about IT.