Digital & Technology

Moomoo's Continuous Innovation Journey on AWS

Moomoo is a financial information and trading app and offers securities services through Moomoo Financial Inc., a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) registered broker. It is regulated by Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), a member of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC). In Australia, the moomoo securities services are available through Futu Securities (Australia), which is regulated by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).

The moomoo app supports iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, and OpenAPI across a wide range of desktop and mobile devices. The app delivers a millisecond stock exchange experience and allows users to create new online accounts and start receiving real-time market information within minutes.

Moomoo, and its affiliate companies, now has almost 20 million users across over 200 countries and regions. It offers fully electronic broker-dealer services for the U.S. and Hong Kong stock markets. Moomoo has also rolled out Moo Community, a social networking module that bring users, investors, businesses, analysts, media outlets, and opinion leaders together in an information sharing ecosystem.

Searching for A Globally Compliant and Secure IT infrastructure

Moomoo's independently-developed trading system integrates the front-end user app, middle-office transaction, and back-office settlement, and delivers ultra-low latency and ultra-high concurrency, offering users an optimized experience in account opening, deposits and withdrawals, market data, transaction, information service, and settlement. Through a firm commitment to technology and innovation, moomoo is able to deliver a superior product experience. In a fast-changing financial market, with users and regulators expecting more from broker-dealer platforms, moomoo is motivated to provide users with quicker and more secure financial services through technology advancements.

Specifically, the moomoo team wanted a solution that efficiently deploys and scales IT resources in regions globally, with the assurance that these resources all comply to local security and compliance regulations. This allows the team to focus more on business innovation instead of infrastructure maintenance. Moomoo also wanted to adapt current industry best practices, to learn from and build synergies with industry partners, and to draw on others' experiences in running a global business. Moomoo decided that migrating to cloud services was the way to go.

 

Moomoo has built its core securities trading platform on AWS to connect its global business partners within a week. AWS brings global security and compliance and a 30 percent improvement in work efficiency. It helps the moomoo team focus more on service innovation and continuous user experience optimization."

Ivan Zhang - Head of Global Infrastructure Team, moomoo

 

Relying on AWS's Regulatory Compliance

Amazon Web Services (AWS) powers moomoo with assurance for security and compliance, high-quality technical services and support, and its industry partner ecosystem. These has helped moomoo innovate faster, deliver complex financial services, and achieve cloud- native transition.

By running on AWS, the moomoo team saves time and energy in assessing and complying with security and compliance requirement for IT resources. Using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) has helped moomoo deliver effective and simpler data storage, transmission, and encryption operations, and address the data compliance requirements for each component of the service process.

With AWS Transit Gateway and AWS Network Firewall, the moomoo team was able to build a cross-border network on AWS Global Infrastructure within a week, complete its IT structure in advance, and launch services on time. The AWS team also provided 24x7 support for moomoo, using AWS Infrastructure Event Management (IEM) to precisely match IT resources to infrastructure needs, ensuring the smooth global launch of the moomoo app.

In 2021, moomoo built its global business network using AWS's global network and partner resources to connect with exchanges, market data vendors, and various upstream and downstream partners within a week. "AWS powers moomoo to bring optimized trading experience to its users fast." says Ivan Zhang, head of Global Infrastructure Team, Moomoo.

Moomoo runs its core securities trading platform on AWS. Its app integrates market data, account opening application, trading details and intelligent analysis modules, and offers trading services for over 10,000 subject assets including stocks, ETFs, ADRs, and options. It has higher than 99.999 percent availability of cloud middleware and database, and thus assures stable access to consistent, safe and reliable services for global investors. AWS services used include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon S3, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), AWS Transit Gateway, Elastic Load Balancing(ELB), Amazon Elasticache for RedisAmazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon EMRAmazon Managed Streaming for Apache KafkaAmazon OpenSearch Service, Amazon IAM, AWS KMS, AWS Resource Access Manager, AWS Network Firewall, Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), Amazon CloudWatch, and AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS). 

Running Faster, with More Efficiency

By running on AWS, the moomoo team can focus more on business process control, authority management, and data governance. "Moomoo prioritizes the need to better meet the compliance requirements and deliver the next-generation Internet financial services across the globe. AWS's experience in fintech use cases offer us concrete and effective
guidance," says Zhang. "Deploying and operating business on AWS saves both time and energy on infrastructure security and compliance. Our security management team is 30 percent more efficient.

AWS's fine-grained network control, security policies, comprehensive data encryption, key management, and network firewall mechanisms, helps moomoo provide an IT infrastructure
that satisfies the financial compliance requirements and applicable regulations. We can now focus more on business innovation."

Moomoo offers users free level 2 market data* refreshed every 0.3 second, reducing information asymmetry to identify potential opportunities and risks. moomoo also plans to implement big data analytics on its app to extract useful information from disparate transaction, business, system, and user activity logs. This moves it closer to offering a data- driven middle office to better support business operations, user growth, and product innovation.

*Level 2 market data is free to moomoo users that have an approved brokerage account with Moomoo Financial Inc.

Moomoo has more than doubled its operational efficiency, shortening the time to market from three months to one month when expanding to regional markets. Moomoo has also seen a 60–80 percent reduction in maintenance tasks across its underlying networks, data centers, and middleware.

Leveraging Machine Learning for Service Innovation

By leveraging AWS's advanced services, moomoo can focus on its goal to make investing easier. For example, moomoo will build a cloud customer service center on Amazon Connect to provide users with an intelligent customer service experience that is 80 percent more cost-effective than the traditional ones.

To bring end users an enriching investing experience, moomoo will also deploy AWS artificial intelligence and machine learning services for service innovation. For example, moomoo is using Amazon Translate, a neural machine translation service, to provide users with multilingual support, and improve its localized services in different countries/regions to better serve its global users. Amazon Kendra is another service on moomoo's adoption list. This service makes content search easier to provide greater investment insights.