Finexus Group specializes in developing solutions for the financial services industry in Malaysia, the wider Southeast Asia region and throughout Europe and North America. Based in Kuala Lumpur, Finexus acts as a data processor for major payment card brands, including Alipay, Mastercard and Visa, and provides applications, services and solutions based on its Finexus Cloud platform. It is also a licensed Digital Money Services Provider and plays a crucial role as a Regulatory Reporting and Payment Solutions Provider in Malaysia, facilitating compliance and efficient payment processing for the banking industry.
At-a-Glance
Facing limitations with monolithic applications hosted on individual servers, Finexus sought to improve flexibility and optimize capacity within its existing IT infrastructure. By adopting containerization and implementing SUSE Rancher Prime to manage its Kubernetes environment, Finexus has embarked on a journey to achieve operations that are over 20% more efficient. This transformation enables application workloads to be moved easily and quickly, allowing comprehensive management, multi-tenant operations and greater processing efficiency for each of its clients.
Transforming for the future
Working in the dynamic world of banking and finance, Finexus continually seeks new ways to optimize and streamline operations using the latest technologies and innovations. With more than 100 banks and fintech companies relying on its services, maintaining high availability and performance is paramount.
For many of its banking clients, Finexus develops custom applications hosted in its highly secure data centers. Historically, each client was assigned a physical server, configured with processor, memory, bandwidth and storage tailored to the expected workload. In an uncertain world, however, transaction volumes can rise and fall dramatically, leading to optimization constraints or systems lying relatively idle.
When workload demands increased, moving a client application to a larger server was typically a slow and costly process. Older applications, often designed as monolithic solutions, lacked the flexibility and integration capabilities of modern software. This made it difficult for Finexus to fully optimize its infrastructure, leaving clients at risk of missing out on innovations available from the latest cloud solutions. Additionally, these customized applications did not lend themselves to deployment automation.
As Finexus grew, the need for a more flexible and scalable infrastructure became evident. The company sought ways to scale up rapidly and easily, transforming its own and its customers’ operations into more nimble and modern workflows. This realization led Finexus to explore containerization as a solution to modernize its operations and support rapid growth.
“At Finexus, we are very focused on continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), and it is important for us to use, and to be seen to be using, the latest technologies,” comments Dhruv Purushottam, Director of Technology at Finexus. “We want to help clients on older platforms move into the modern era, but their architecture can make this difficult to achieve.”
Recognizing these challenges, Finexus began evaluating various solutions in the market that could modernize its infrastructure and enable significant expansion.
“An attractive feature of SUSE Rancher Prime is its ability to orchestrate, manage and maintain multiple clusters, regardless of hardware or cloud vendor, from a single user interface.”
Why SUSE Rancher Prime?
Evaluating several solutions, Finexus focused on criteria such as CI/CD processes suitable for air-gapped environments, ease of implementation with automation, alignment with industry best practices for cluster maintenance, proper procedures for maintenance tasks, and secure methods for granting developers access to Kubernetes clusters.
After rigorous evaluation, including a proof of concept (POC) with an alternative solution that didn't meet its needs, Finexus selected SUSE Rancher Prime for a POC, designed to learn more about the technical possibilities and commercial opportunities of using containers.
“We moved some of our developer environments to SUSE Rancher Prime, and found the process was very straightforward,” says Purushottam. “The documentation is easy to understand, and it was clear that the SUSE Rancher Prime support offering would help us with commercialization and deployment at scale.”
As Finexus moves into production with containerized applications, SUSE Rancher Prime also provides the all-important integrated tools for managing and running its Kubernetes clusters.
“A key decision factor was the open source nature of SUSE Rancher Prime, which helps us avoid vendor lock-in to proprietary software,” says Purushottam. “With strong and enthusiastic support from SUSE, we were able to go into production within just a couple of months.”
The impact of SUSE solutions
Achieves over 20% efficiency improvement
Using SUSE Rancher Prime to manage its Kubernetes environments, Finexus has made a successful start on its journey to optimize its data center infrastructure, anticipating an estimated efficiency improvement of over 20%. By efficiently orchestrating Kubernetes clusters with SUSE Rancher Prime, Finexus is reducing costs and providing a more streamlined, cost-effective service to clients.
Reduces costs with autoscaling features
Previously, if a client needed more processing capacity, the client would have had to fund new hardware, hosted within a Finexus data center. Now, with containerization, Finexus has a scalable platform that can dynamically expand client environments in real time and with highly efficient use of the underlying compute resources.
Finexus uses SUSE Rancher Prime's autoscaling feature to adjust resources automatically based on demand, leading to significant cost savings.
“Containerization with SUSE Rancher Prime’s autoscaling feature helps us save costs by automatically adjusting resources based on demand, avoiding over-investment in hardware, and allows us to provide a modern, responsive environment to our clients,” explains Purushottam.
Builds credibility with modern solutions
Beyond cost savings, adopting SUSE Rancher Prime has also strengthened Finexus's market position.
Purushottam states, “Some of our clients are startup digital banks with an entirely fresh tech stack, and when they see us investing in containerization with SUSE Rancher Prime, it helps drive our credibility.”
Streamlines operations in air-gapped environments
Finexus is already hosting some containerized client solutions in its data centers, using SUSE Rancher Prime to manage Kubernetes clusters across a diverse range of server hardware.
“SUSE Rancher Prime has enabled effective operations in our air-gapped environments, streamlined our CI/CD processes and reduced manual actions through automation,” says Purushottam.
Simplifies multi-cluster management
SUSE Rancher Prime's ability to orchestrate, manage and maintain multiple clusters has significantly simplified Finexus' operations.
“An attractive feature of SUSE Rancher Prime is its ability to orchestrate, manage and maintain multiple clusters, regardless of hardware or cloud vendor, from a single user interface,” says Purushottam.
Enhances storage capabilities with SUSE Storage integration
SUSE Rancher Prime’s integration with SUSE Storage for block storage has further enhanced Finexus's storage capabilities.
“While our primary concern is managing Kubernetes, we also need persistent storage that can be replicated and accessed from different places,” says Purushottam. “The combination of these two open source SUSE solutions [Rancher Prime, SUSE Storage] makes perfect sense for Finexus.”
Through these improvements, Finexus is well-positioned to continue growing and to provide exceptional service to its clients.
Powers strategic, high-growth AREMA e-invoicing service
Leveraging the reliability and agility of SUSE Rancher Prime and SUSE Storage, Finexus has become the first company in Malaysia to launch a solution designed to help businesses comply with the e-invoicing mandate set forth by the Inland Revenue Board of Malaysia (LHDN). E-invoicing in Malaysia is set to become mandatory for all businesses, aiming to enhance transparency and accuracy in tax reporting, reduce manual processing and ensure compliance with tax regulations. The Finexus solution, AREMA, acts as middleware, seamlessly integrating with various systems — such as accounting or ERP platforms — to streamline the creation and submission of electronic invoices to LHDN.
“By hosting AREMA on SUSE Rancher Prime, we can ensure seamless integration with customer systems, maintain compliance with Malaysian tax regulations and provide automated updates to accommodate future LHDN changes,” says Purushottam. “The containerized architecture allows us to rapidly scale and adapt AREMA to meet evolving client needs, making it a highly efficient tool for businesses navigating the new e-invoicing requirements.”
As the first to market with an e-invoicing solution, Finexus has a significant competitive advantage. The successful launch of AREMA underscores the transformative impact of SUSE Rancher Prime and SUSE Storage on Finexus's operations. “AREMA is a very strategic application for us, as we expect to at least double in revenue during 2025,” adds Purushottam. “SUSE's solutions have empowered us to innovate quickly and deliver critical services that position us at the forefront of Malaysia’s financial services industry.”
The impact of SUSE Consulting Services
Throughout the POC stage and into production, SUSE Consulting Services collaborated closely with Finexus to tailor solutions to its unique challenges, establishing best practices and maximizing the benefits of SUSE Rancher Prime and SUSE Storage.
“For Finexus and our clients, high availability is essential. Being relatively new to containerization, we turned to SUSE Consulting Services for assistance,” remarks Purushottam. “SUSE Consulting Services helped us tailor our solution design to meet our unique challenges, including operating in air-gapped environments and aligning with industry best practices. Their guidance gave our development teams confidence that we were following industry best practices around Kubernetes.”
What’s next for Finexus?
Finexus plans to expand its Kubernetes environment, containerizing more of its applications. As the company rewrites older solutions and designs new services, SUSE Rancher Prime will enable the optimization of the Kubernetes environment. Finexus is also now exploring options to expand containerization from its own data centers into hybrid-cloud and full-cloud scenarios, considering SUSE's solutions for potential hybrid-cloud deployments and advanced container orchestration strategies.
“The ease of managing a multi-tenant architecture with SUSE Rancher Prime is a significant flexibility advantage and cost-saver,” says Purushottam. “With SUSE Rancher Prime, we can move customers from one cluster to another easily and quickly, which would previously have been difficult to achieve. We have also made significant progress on improving availability, and our customers are very happy with the advantages that SUSE Rancher Prime brings.”
Looking ahead, Finexus intends to continue leveraging SUSE's open source solutions to stay at the forefront of technological innovation in financial services. “Our partnership with SUSE has not only resolved our current challenges but also positioned us for future growth,” adds Purushottam. “We are confident that with SUSE Rancher Prime and SUSE support, we will continue to meet the evolving needs of our clients and maintain our competitive edge.