Powering regional growth and cloud-enabled scalability
As a leader in the regional financial services landscape, The Mauritius Commercial Bank (MCB) continuously seeks innovative solutions to support its growth and operations. By partnering with Nasdaq Financial Technology, MCB has embraced a comprehensive front-to-back capital markets solution, accelerating its cloud journey to drive efficiency, enhance agility, and expand its treasury and Financial Markets operations across the region and beyond.
Besides offering banking, lending and investment solutions to its local customer base, the MCB Group plays an active role in financing of major cross-border transactions across selected markets. Its investment activities extend across sub-Saharan Africa and beyond, reflecting the Group's growing regional and international reach whilst remaining committed to strengthening its position as a specialist bank, especially in the treasury and Financial Markets space.
By partnering with Nasdaq Financial Technology, MCB has established a scalable, cloud-enabled foundation to further expand its treasury and Financial Markets operations. This collaboration leverages Nasdaq's Calypso and CapCloud solutions, empowering the Bank to accelerate growth and enhance its technological capabilities across these critical areas.
Supporting cross-asset growth
MCB implemented Calypso in 2018, just as the Bank began to experience a growth spurt in its Financial Markets business. The Bank needed a robust, integrated solution to manage its growing portfolio and reduce inefficiencies and operational risk by replacing a legacy web of disparate technology that was being strained by new volumes. Doing so would enable the Bank to generate new efficiencies and cost savings through automation and increased functionality.
Today, MCB continues to see growing volumes and the original goals of the implementation have served the Bank well. It credits Calypso with being core to its ability to facilitate and support financial markets growth in traditional strengths of foreign exchange, fixed income and interest rate products and expansion into asset classes such as commodities, which was seen as a client demand.
MCB leverages Calypso as a comprehensive, front-to-back solution across the entire trade life cycle, from at-trade pricing through middle-office processing, risk- and collateral management to back-office accounting and reporting. This end-to-end integration enables deep asset class coverage and operational agility. MCB continues to increase its ability to quickly introduce new structured products to the market by using Calypso automation to test and rationalize innovative trading floor ideas. “We use all the functionalities of Nasdaq Calypso from start to finish in order to extract the maximum value out of the system”—Kabir Ramburn, Head of Business Management, Financial Markets, MCB.
Accelerating the cloud journey
In 2024, MCB decided to migrate its Calypso instance to the cloud with the Nasdaq Calypso CapCloud SaaS offering, aligning with the Bank’s overall modernization and business transformation strategy. The Bank had an existing roadmap for its cloud journey, knowing it would be vital technology for day-to-day operations and future-proofed long-term success.
Markets are always moving and as a growing business, MCB realised the need to be nimble, leverage the scalability of the cloud, and benefit from continuous system enhancements without disrupting the business. By outsourcing technical expertise and capacity, MCB enjoys the advantages of cloud-delivered software while freeing core staff to focus on business development and what they do best. The end result is a Financial Markets team empowered by scalable infrastructure and robust services that keep them up to date with frequent system upgrades and automatic testing.
Close partnership with room to grow
As part of the cloud shift, MCB and Nasdaq worked closely to collaborate on a shared roadmap so that all expectations, outcomes and measures were understood and documented. The cloud transition idea was thoroughly worked through. Being able to tap the cloud knowledge and track record of Nasdaq was a major benefit of the working relationship for MCB decision-makers, who were able to gain the approval of the Bank’s Board and regulator.
The collaborative roadmap is underway. MCB is preparing to upgrade to a new version of Calypso and extend these improvements to its regional subsidiaries in the Maldives and Seychelles. With a fully managed service, MCB can optimise resources effectively, positioning itself to navigate the complexities of growth while maintaining operational excellence and customer satisfaction. With the creation of Nasdaq Financial Technology, MCB sees even more room for collaboration and deepening the relationship.
"Our Financial Markets business has been expanding at a formidable pace supported by a solid foundation with Nasdaq Calypso, a true front-to-back platform that enables us to explore and grow into new areas. We are looking forward to further enhancing our agility by migrating to CapCloud, leveraging the cloud’s scalability and Nasdaq’s light rebase approach to achieve even faster time-to-market for our Bank as we serve our growing client community.”— Kabir Ramburn, Head of Business Management, Financial Markets, MCB.
Solution Highlights
- Nasdaq Calypso is an end-to-end capital markets solution covering front-, middle- and back-office functions for multiple asset classes.
- The move to Nasdaq’s SaaS CapCloud and cloud services allows the MCB team to focus its expertise and resources on core activities and business development.
About Nasdaq Financial Technology
Nasdaq is a global technology company serving the capital markets and other industries. As one of the world's largest market infrastructure technology providers, Nasdaq provides multi-asset solutions that power 135+ marketplaces, CCPs, CSDs, regulators and central banks in over 50 countries while also servicing the bank and broker-dealer community and buy-side market participants. The institutional-grade technology across the trade life cycle sets the benchmark for performance, reliability, and scalability, helping organisations to drive efficiency, transparency, and liquidity with unparalleled resiliency. Nasdaq capabilities are unique, road-tested and the foundation for modernised markets.
