Morningstar Uses AWS to Rapidly Create Online Investment Marketplace
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Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- AWS Elastic Beanstalk
- Amazon API Gateway
- Amazon EC2
- Amazon ECS
- Amazon RDS
Tech Stack
- .NET
- PostgreSQL
- Node.JS
- Docker
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Finance & Insurance
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
- Fraud Detection
- Supply Chain Visibility
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
About The Customer
Morningstar, Inc., is a leading global provider of independent investment research and products and services for financial advisors, asset managers, retirement-plan providers and sponsors, and individual and institutional investors. It is based in the United States and employs over 4,300 people. The company offers a wide range of services and products, including investment research, financial planning tools, and investment management services. Morningstar is committed to providing independent and unbiased investment information to help investors make informed decisions. The company's mission is to create great products that help investors reach their financial goals.
The Challenge
In 2016, the U.S. Department of Labor announced upcoming rule changes that would hold brokers and other investment advisers to a “fiduciary standard,” meaning they would be legally required to act in the best financial interest of their clients. This shift would restrict the types of investments that could be selected for certain retirement plans. Morningstar, Inc. recognized an opportunity to help employers find investments that comply with the fiduciary rule through an easy-to-use, online marketplace named Morningstar Plan Advantage. The marketplace would explain the regulations, offer searching and filtering of compliant investments, and ease enrollment into these plans. APIs connected to the application would allow investment providers to push data into the marketplace. Morningstar hoped to deliver an outstanding experience for employers and investment providers, and build revenue by increasing sales of plans for which they provide administrative services.
The Solution
Building the online investment marketplace was the responsibility of the Morningstar Workplace division. As part of an overall journey toward increased use of cloud services, Morningstar had been using Amazon Web Services (AWS) in various capacities across the organization as a supplement to its own data centers. Morningstar Workplace chose to use Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) because it allowed the team to independently provision cloud-based development environments while retaining the ability to securely connect to corporate data centers. This combination of agility and control helped Morningstar Workplace get the product to market in time for the rule change. While Morningstar corporate data centers tend to use SQL Server, the Workplace team wanted to use a low-maintenance database hosted in Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to speed time-to-market and improve the manageability of the new application. To host the APIs, Morningstar used AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Amazon API Gateway provides a streamlined way for financial services providers to add their products to the marketplace, and will accommodate rapid growth after the regulation goes into effect. The marketplace also employs Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to host assets and data, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for basic computing services.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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