Edstem partnered with a leading UK-based Independent Trustee and Escrow solutions provider to digitally transform their core operational systems. The client manages highly sensitive and complex financial agreements, requiring guaranteed precision, robust security, and compliance.
Edstem modernized their legacy workflows into a secure, cloud-native platform, enabling complete automation of calculations, validations, reconciliations, and reporting — all triggered seamlessly through a simple file upload.
The Challenge
The client's legacy system was struggling with the complexity and volume of the financial data it needed to process. Four core challenges shaped the transformation initiative:
Zero Tolerance for Error: Trustee operations involve managing client-held capital, meaning every calculation must be 100% accurate. Manual verification created operational strain and risk.
Highly Variable Business Rules: Each engagement has unique trustee logic, requiring a platform flexible enough to apply custom business rules without breaking consistency.
Large-Scale Processing: The system needed to handle transactional files with over 1 million rows while ensuring uninterrupted performance and reliability.
Security & Compliance: The solution needed strong encryption, access control, and auditability to safeguard highly sensitive financial information.
The Solution
Edstem built a cloud-native, resilient, and fully automated backend that ensures precision, regulatory compliance, and high scalability. The redesigned system reduces operational complexity to a single action: upload a file, with the entire processing pipeline managed automatically.
Key Solution Highlights
Serverless Compute with AWS Lambda: Automatically scales to handle massive workloads while optimizing cost through a pay-per-use model.
Asynchronous Processing with Kafka: Ensures stable, high-throughput batch processing of very large datasets through decoupled, resilient workflow orchestration.
Flexible Data Storage Using MongoDB: Allows each client's unique trustee logic to be applied while maintaining strict data security standards.
Open Banking Integration: Enables real-time financial reconciliation using providers like Truelayer and direct integrations with major UK institutions.
Automated Email Notifications: Key operational events trigger notifications, improving communication accuracy and audit compliance.
The Approach
The transformation was executed in two structured phases:
Phase 1: Complex Data Migration
A robust migration framework was developed to move historical data into the new system. Custom validation scripts ensured every record was accurately reconciled, creating a trustworthy data foundation.
Phase 2: Automation & Real-time Reconciliation
Core operations were fully automated, including calculations, validations, reconciliation logic, and reporting.
Open Banking verification and event-driven notifications streamlined compliance-heavy tasks and reduced manual intervention.
The Results
The modernized platform produced immediate and measurable improvements across operational efficiency, scalability, and reliability.
Over 1,000 man-hours saved every month: Automation removed the need for repetitive manual checks and data validations, freeing the operations team to focus on higher-value client work.
Effortless processing of million-row files: The new serverless and Kafka-backed architecture handles extremely large datasets without lag, manual oversight, or system failures.
99.5% system availability with guaranteed calculation precision: The platform now maintains high uptime and ensures mathematically perfect results across all trustee operations.
Significant cost avoidance: The client avoided the need to expand their operations team despite growing data volumes. The automation pipeline scaled in place of additional staffing.
Overall, the transformation eliminated the most error-prone, time-consuming, and compliance-heavy parts of the trustee workflow. The client now operates with higher accuracy, lower cost, and increased confidence in their ability to scale securely and efficiently.
