Straight-Through Processing: How a Broker Reached 90% in 12 Weeks

Case study

Malaysia

Institutional & retail brokerage

Live in 12 weeks

From manual drag to 90% straight-through processing.

One of Malaysia’s largest and longest-established brokerages – five decades of market leadership, growing volumes, and an operation still held together by manual reconciliation. It was not underperforming. It was constrained by infrastructure built for a different era. Twelve weeks later, the constraint was gone.

Client

A leading Malaysian brokerage, 50+ years in market

Mandate

Modernise post-trade without disrupting live business

Scope

NOVA CMX Post Trade - full production rollout

Time to live

12 weeks, zero rollback

The outcome

Measured at go-live. Still compounding.

>90%

Straight-through processing

Automated end to end, manual handoffs eliminated

>30%

Faster settlement

Accelerated cycles across every trade type

~5×

Volume growth

Absorbed with no increase in operations headcount

~17k+

Man-hours saved annually

Repetitive reconciliation removed at source

>90%

Turnaround reduction

Process delays eliminated at the root

100%

Client satisfaction

Recorded post-transformation

The starting point

Growth was happening.
Operational scalability was not.

Legacy fragmentation

Siloed workflows across departments, heavy manual reconciliation, and maintenance spend that consumed engineering capacity without producing competitive value.

Manual bottlenecks

Repetitive, error-prone processing meant long turnaround times and little real-time visibility. Operations were reactive by design.

Compliance pressure

Rising audit scrutiny and more complex reporting, landing on teams already stretched by manual workload.

Capped growth

Onboarding new products and clients was slow and costly, and volume spikes could not be absorbed without fatigue.

The mandate

Modernise post-trade operations without disrupting live business, and deliver measurable impact fast.

What changed

Structural operating leverage, not incremental tuning.

Cost per trade
Revenue scaled. Costs did not. Five times the trade volume moved through the same operations team, converting growth directly into margin instead of headcount.
Operational risk
Fewer breaks, stronger control. Automation replaced fragmented handoffs entirely, cutting exception-handling cost and improving audit defensibility in a single move.
People
17,000+ hours returned to the business each year. Staff moved from reconciliation to value-added work, with a productivity uplift estimated at 35–50% across the operations function.
Client experience
Faster confirmations, faster exception resolution. A 30% acceleration in settlement and trade processing showed up where clients notice it – and satisfaction was recorded at 100% post-transformation.
Compliance
Proactive, not reactive. Automated checks and real-time reporting across the post-trade workflow reduced regulatory exposure and simplified audit.

Why this matters for you

The benchmark has been set.

Most brokers and investment banks still run fragmented architecture, high manual processing ratios and cost-heavy operating models. The question is no longer whether to modernise – it is whether your infrastructure can keep pace. The gap between firms that act and firms that wait widens every quarter.

Capital markets - engineered

Twelve weeks is the benchmark, not the exception.

Bring us your current cost to serve and your manual processing ratio. We will model the same diagnostic against your trade flow and show you what the other side looks like – with no upfront fee.

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