Data management 15 Feb 2023

How a financial services company modernized an unstable and unscalable legacy system

Financial services companies are often behind the curve when it comes to digital innovation. A combination of regulatory strictures and the complexity of in-house legacy solutions that the business depends on has made IT decision-makers unsurprisingly hesitant to turn to the cloud or serverless architecture.Midland Credit Management (MCM), one of the largest debt buyer and debt collection companies in the U.S., was in a similar position, mired in relational databases and a highly customized monolithic architecture. They faced an increasingly unstable, unscalable backend environment and solutions, and teams were in constant firefighting mode.“Because of how complex the environment was, if you wanted to make any changes it was almost impossible to make them without breaking anything,” says Ali Montazer, CTO of MCM.In a world where digital innovation is increasingly synonymous with competitive advantage, company leaders recognized the need to modernize or fall behind, Montazer adds. It meant changing how the company designs, builds and manages applications which led them to prioritize solutions that enabled their developers to be much more agile.To meet that challenge, Montazer says, “you need to change the focus from building applications that just serve one purpose and then building on top of that, to more holistically looking at your environment, looking at your use cases, and being able to distribute and scale them as much as possible.”