CASE STUDY: FIRST RATE EXCHANGE SERVICES

First Rate Exchange Services is a leading provider of foreign exchange solutions, primarily serving the needs of financial institutions, businesses, and travellers in the United Kingdom.

The company specialises in offering competitive currency exchange rates, along with a range of related services such as currency buyback, international payments, and travel money solutions. 

First Rate Exchange Services partners with banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions to provide seamless and efficient currency exchange services, leveraging their expertise and extensive market knowledge to ensure their clients receive optimal value and convenience when dealing with foreign currencies.

The UK’s leading foreign currency exchange service, providing currency to retail outlets and holiday makers, First Rate Exchange Services pioneered 0% commission for consumers which revolutionised the FX market. They have also been voted Best Travel Money Provider 12 times, and numerous other prestigious industry awards.

THE CHALLENGE

FRES were looking to replace the existing ageing infrastructure with a more ‘fit-for-purpose’ solution to allow them to continue to support both their legacy environments and new services being developed whilst maintaining compliance to PCI-DSS compliance.

They issued a RFQ to evaluate options for the provision of a replacement server virtualisation and networking solution. 

The proposed solution design was required to be deployed across two greenfield interconnected co-location facilities, this had to includes, but was not limited to:

• Server / Storage / Software / Networking / Backup.
• Security considerations for PCI-DSS version 4.
• Professional Services for implementation, migration and handover.

Within the RFQ, the following summary of activities had been highlighted: 

• Meet or exceed the “Key Solution Design Criteria”, which is inclusive of overheads and uplifts. 
• The solution must be compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCIDSS version 4) in relation to the Card Data Environment (CDE). 
• The solution must ensure full automated disaster recovery between two co-location facilities for Production systems across the LAN, CDE and DMZ networks. 
• The provision of a backup solution that meets the following SLA’s:
  

Recovery Time Objective.

• Near Zero Production, Pre-Production 1 day 

or

• 2 hours for Production, Pre-Production 1 day. 

Recovery Point Objective.

• Zero Production, Pre-Production 1 day.

or 

• Production 15 minutes, Pre-Production 1 day.
  
• The solution requires near real time and historical visibility of the environment including:

East-West and North-South traffic flows, virtual machines, physical estate, firewalls, physical network estate.

• The solution is to have full interoperability with boarder gateway protocol running on independent firewalls in each facility. 
• Full interoperability with existing virtual load balancers or alternative load balancing solutions. 
• All ethernet / fibre channel switches, cables, transceivers etc. are required due to the greenfield nature of the deployment. 
• Details on the total footprint and power requirements of the solution in each location.
• Must include 5 years’ hardware and software support. 
• Implementation of the solution including project plan.

THE SOLUTION

Simplify IT and Bytes reviewed, matched the infrastructure requirements and security constraints to determine that a fully private cloud solution would best meet both their current requirements as well as future developments. Key to the design was multi-site availability being automated to prevent hardware and infrastructural issues from impacting business day-to-day process.

Additionally, within the design was the ability to ingest cloud services in a secure way to achieve a full hybrid infrastructure.

The solution used was based on a VMware Private Cloud solution with HPE Alletra highly available storage to provide base resilience and non-stop operation. VMware NSX and F5 LTM/DNS as part of the private cloud solution was integral in providing a fully resilient, secure, and automated networking layer.

By using these technologies FRES were able to consolidate on a single secure platform for providing different environments, rather than deploying physically different environments for PCI-DSS compliance which then reduces maintenance and resiliency costs.

During the project delivery, Simplify IT and Bytes led the whole project, including complex technical collaboration with third party telecommunications providers, and working flexibly to accommodate slippages in product delivery. 

Post installation, Simplify IT are now contracted to deliver a managed service, providing preventative maintenance, weekly health checks, change review service, knowledge transfer to the internal IT Team, and acting as escalation point for any incidents which arise.

THE OUTCOME

The consolidation has allowed for FRES to maintain a single solution, rather than multiple solutions. The cloud like nature for compute, storage, and automation of the network layer allows for faster deployment of new services whilst maintaining security of environments from each other. This retains their PCI-DSS status, and as the new solution was deployed against the newer PCI-DSS v4.0 standards, this meant that FRES met the compliance target of Q1 2025, ahead of schedule.

The amount of physical time saved on managing the previous environment has contributed to off-setting some of the cost required to bring FRES on to this new, singular, easy to manage environment that is now scalable on the fly with the hybrid cloud integration abilities. In turn, with the freed up management time – the IT team are now focusing on driving real innovation for the business rather than worrying about day to day management. 

Simplify IT continue to work closely with FRES senior IT staff to ensure that knowledge gaps are reduced, therefore reducing business risk during outage or during change control planning. Future iteration and improvement of the system, i.e. introduction of Tanzu based containers, the possible adoption of NSX advanced load balancer or the virtualisation of production Oracle database clusters are all ongoing conversations within the close partnership between FRES and Simplify IT.