Paris-based Metori Capital Management relies on its own proprietary algorithms to manage assets worth more than €350 million in the Epsilon fund. Metori needed to build an enterprise platform that could support its ambitious growth goals and deliver high value to investors, so it chose Microsoft Azure to host its Epsilon management service. Now, Metori has the enterprise capabilities it needs at less cost and a shared data environment that helps it deliver seamless service and high value.
In the dizzying world of hedge funds, money-market securities and medium-term debt instruments, Paris-based Metori Capital Management focuses its efforts on growing a fund called Epsilon. Pension funds and other institutional investors rely on Metori to manage and grow assets worth more than €350 million.
Spun off in 2016 from Lyxor Asset Management, a subsidiary of the French bank Societe Generale, Metori is a medium-sized fund manager. But the Metori principals know the Epsilon fund well. With the fund’s historically strong performance, the company expects to scale quickly and globally.
Metori relies on sophisticated technology and proprietary algorithms to help it buy, sell and manage assets in Epsilon. It needed to build an enterprise platform that could support these algorithms, meet compliance and safeguard data. And to keep pace with its ambition, Metori also wanted easy scalability and reliable business continuity.
Metori chose Microsoft Azure cloud services to support its Epsilon management service. “We wanted a solution that would help us to compete, scale and innovate, while controlling costs and system management burden,” said Nicolas Gaussel, CEO at Metori Capital Management. “The upsides to Microsoft cloud services were all so big that we anticipated Azure was the right choice.”
The company Chief Technology Officer, Loïc Guenin, worked with Microsoft Consulting Services to develop a two-stage move to Azure. In May 2017, it began hosting the Epsilon service with Azure Virtual Machines. Metori uses Azure SQL Database in conjunction with an Azure virtual machine (VM) to store all of its market data. It connects the database to other Azure VMs to process portfolio transactions and to a Bloomberg API hosted on another Azure VM to execute the orders.
“Microsoft listened to our concerns and understood our goals,” said Philippe Carpentier, Senior Fund Manager at Metori Capital Management. “They helped us prioritise every aspect of our Azure environment for performance, security and reliability.”
Once Epsilon was running on Azure, Metori began transferring select functions to a mix of Microsoft Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) capabilities. All employees at Metori already use Microsoft Office 365 for their daily work and to connect with colleagues and customers. By mid-2018, Metori expects to move all databases and other core Epsilon functions from Azure VMs to Azure platform services.
By using Azure, Metori gets the enterprise capabilities it needs to stay connected to markets and investors, meet multiple compliance requirements, retain and safeguard data, and ensure business continuity, while it only pays for the services it consumes. “Without Azure, it might have cost us 10 times more to build an environment that could cope with the future we expect,” said Nicolas Gaussel. The company also uses tools such as Azure Log Analytics, Azure Backup and Azure Automation to streamline critical IT management functions.
Metori saved money on deploying Epsilon and it can also update and enhance the service faster, easier, at a lower cost. “We can scale the Azure service seamlessly,” said Nicolas Gaussel. “And with more frequent releases and updates, we can maintain a reputation for cutting-edge technology.”
Today Metori manages €350 million in assets, trades €30 billion a year and executes transactions worth €150 million a day. To meet spikes and dips in fund activity, Metori can throttle Azure compute and storage resources. It can scale across geographies to connect seamlessly — and selectively — with business teams in China, research partners in France, or important customers around the world, while safeguarding sensitive data. This is possible by giving different kinds of accesses to different people.
“With Azure and Office 365, we can give our teams, partners and customers network access, but be selective,” said Philippe Carpentier. “We’ve found a good balance between security and openness.”
Additionally, Azure Security Center simplifies security management and Azure VPN Gateway enables users to connect more securely from anywhere.
According to Nicolas Gaussel and Philippe Carpentier, the Metori team always wanted to start from a central, shared environment, so they could deliver seamless service and high value for their investors.
“Choosing Azure allowed us to deploy a vision of managing data for collaboration, reporting, customer management, or for whatever we need,” added Gaussel. “I’m not sure it would have been possible with another kind of infrastructure.”
