How Adaptavist helped BetaNXT improve delivery efficiency with GitLab Ultimate

Discover how Adaptavist helped BetaNXT standardise its tooling, optimise its technical delivery, and enhance its security with GitLab Ultimate.

Requirements at a glance

Ensure consistency between development and delivery.
Provide real-time visibility across the company’s technology portfolio.
Accelerate development cycles while ensuring security and reliability.
Embed best practices in development and governance.
Conduct thorough security scans, code analysis, and testing.
Streamline and centralise tool management.
Facilitate rapid and continuous innovation.

Industry: Wealth management/Fintech

Solution: GitLab Ultimate

Total employees: 1,000+

Clients: Financial brokers, advisors, and investors

Summary

The wealth management industry continues to evolve as technology advances, client expectations rise, and competition heightens. Keeping pace is no longer enough. To stay competitive, providers must continuously expand and diversify their portfolios to deliver new value to clients.

With this goal in mind, BetaNXT partnered with Adaptavist to transform its product development lifecycle using GitLab Ultimate. The result? With a unified and streamlined solution now in place, BetaNXT can bring innovative products to market faster, deliver superior client experiences, and position itself for future growth and success.

There was a proliferation of tools, with many doing the same or similar things from a development perspective. To ensure consistency across our approach, we needed a single solution to consolidate licences and standardise our processes and ways of working.

Frank Merla

Enterprise Solutions Architect, BetaNXT

Established in 2022, BetaNXT offers comprehensive wealth management solutions for brokers, advisors, and investors. Its platform serves over 50 million investors and facilitates 37 million transactions daily, providing a seamless end-to-end wealth management experience.

BetaNXT was formed from the acquisition of the BETA+ platform from the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG). It inherited several established businesses, including Beta, Maxit, and Mediant. Each had its own development tools, approaches, and ways of working, so achieving consistency was challenging. They had to unify their development tools and processes to face these challenges head-on and advance their DevOps capabilities.

The challenge

Disparate approaches

As teams used a variety of development tools and approaches, it was difficult to streamline workflows, share information, and collaborate effectively.

No clear picture of progress

As every team had its own process for communicating updates, it was challenging to avoid silos developing and maintain a clear picture of all the moving parts.

Growing complexity

Multiple tools and approaches were complicating the DevOps process, slowing development cycles and increasing the risk of errors and failures.

Lack of standardisation

Establishing best practices and ensuring consistency across projects was difficult without standardised tools and approaches—leading to inefficiency and inconsistency.

To deliver consistent client experiences, we had to streamline our tools and workflows across the board. Our challenge was finding a partner who could help guide us through that process so that we could find a scalable solution that would meet our existing needs and support our growth in the future. Adaptavist's knowledge and proven expertise in innovative DevOps tooling and best practice approaches made them an ideal partner for the project.

Frank Merla

Enterprise Solutions Architect, BetaNXT

The solution

As BetaNXT's existing development tools were owned and operated by LSEG, its first priority was migrating from the legacy LSEG platform and ending the transitional service agreements (TSAs). With the help of Adaptavist, they achieved this goal well ahead of schedule.

BetaNXT already used GitLab for some of its operations, albeit a legacy version hosted by LSEG. After evaluating other options on the market in collaboration with Adaptavist, they decided to go with GitLab Ultimate for its new end-to-end software development and deployment solution.

Key reasons for choosing GitLab included:

Comprehensive vulnerability and compliance management (with security dashboard)

Multi-project continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD)

Advanced pipeline capabilities

Advanced security testing and scanning capabilities

One-stop portfolio management and visibility

High availability and reliability

Proven reduction in code defects and delivery efficiency

The earlier we moved off the LSEG platform, the more cost savings we could make. And while it was pretty stressful at times, working in partnership with Adaptavist, we managed to migrate six months ahead of schedule—a fantastic result!

Paul Simonetti

Information Technology, Executive Management, BetaNXT

Moving to a unified DevOps solution with GitLab

Adaptavist helped BetaNXT transition from Jenkins and other custom-built development tools to GitLab, supporting the smooth migration of code repositories, pipelines, and build steps. They also facilitated the development teams' transition to GitLab, ensuring a smooth process by simultaneously testing and running BetaNXT's new AWS infrastructure and GitLab environment in both test and production environments.

‘As we created new pipelines on GitLab, we ran identical builds on the legacy development setup to ensure they produced identical results, ensuring a smooth and stress-free migration to the new environment,’ explains Rodney Young, Principal Strategy Consultant, Adaptavist.

Adaptavist also supported the BetaNXT team in establishing a new centre of excellence to promote standardisation and best practices across its tooling, processes, and methodologies—embedding continuous improvement into every aspect of the business.

‘Now, with our new centre of excellence in place, we can embed agile practices and continuous improvement into our software delivery end to end,’ explains Frank.

The results

As a result of the project, BetaNXT has realised many benefits across the business, including:

67% reduction in tools—cutting costs and complexity.
Unified DevOps solution, powered by GitLab, enabling:
- Real-time visibility into product delivery velocity to facilitate capacity planning and demand management.
- Comprehensive security scanning and monitoring.
- Strengthened security and compliance.
- Greater cross-team collaboration and efficiency.
- Simplified workflows and tooling landscape.
- Higher quality products delivered faster to clients.
- Single solution for all developer needs.

New efficiencies and synergies

The biggest success for BetaNXT was driving standardisation across the company, leading to new efficiencies and synergies.

At the start, we had two different development teams moving and migrating—Beta and Maxit—now we have standard tools and processes in place so we're able to create so many new synergies and efficiencies around how we operate.

Reduced cost and complexity

BetaNXT has now consolidated multiple tools into just a few essentials, reducing licence costs and the complexity and burden of managing multiple systems and applications.

Optimising our costs puts us in a much better position to integrate other processes and create a PDLC centre of excellence. It's enabling us to become much more efficient.

Accurate forecasting and planning

BetaNXT has now been able to remove much of the manual intervention that was prevalent before, meaning they can now get accurate delivery times.

In the future, we will be able to see every request that a client has made and match it with what has been delivered to really drive progress and improve client experience.

One solution for easy onboarding

BetaNXT can onboard new developers quickly and easily and attract the best talent through an innovative in-demand tool suite.

New efficiencies and synergies

The biggest success for BetaNXT was driving standardisation across the company, leading to new efficiencies and synergies.

Reduced cost and complexity

BetaNXT has now consolidated multiple tools into just a few essentials, reducing licence costs and the complexity and burden of managing multiple systems and applications.

Accurate forecasting and planning

BetaNXT has now been able to remove much of the manual intervention that was prevalent before, meaning they can now get accurate delivery times.

One solution for easy onboarding

BetaNXT can onboard new developers quickly and easily and attract the best talent through an innovative in-demand tool suite.

The future

The BetaNXT team continues to enhance the new GitLab solution and is currently exploring additional features, like GitLab Duo, to improve the efficiency of its code development.

We're now able to explore ways to improve our coding efficiency with artificial intelligence through features like GitLab Duo. With a centre of excellence in place, we have the ability to evaluate new capabilities like this in a meticulous and strategic way. It's great to test out new improvements to how we work. Not only does it benefit our clients, but it also promotes a better work-life balance for our team, making it a win-win all around.

Frank Merla

Enterprise Solutions Architect, BetaNXT

Deep dive into the solutions

Read more in-depth articles about the BetaNXT transformation by Adaptavist.

How Adaptavist helped transform BetaNXT's technology architecture to pave the way for future growth and innovation

Discover how Adaptavist helped BetaNXT reduce its tooling by 67% and optimise its technology operations with GitLab and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

READ CASE STUDY

How Adaptavist helped BetaNXT increase operational performance, agility, and security with AWS

Discover how Adaptavist helped accelerate BetaNXT's cloud-first strategy —leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) to modernise and streamline its operations.

READ CASE STUDY

Q&A with our client BetaNXT: How our partnership led to key enterprise outcomes

We dived deeper into BetaNXT's transformation journey and spoke with Paul Simonetti, IT Executive Management, and Frank Merla, Enterprise Solutions Architect at BetaNXT.

READ THE BLOG

Adaptavist and GitLab: empowering digital transformation

Adaptavist's partnership with GitLab is a powerful alliance, leveraging combined capabilities to offer enhanced DevOps services and solutions. As a GitLab Select Channel partner and Professional Services Certified Partner, Adaptavist delivers significant value to organisations, helping them achieve their DevOps goals. This partnership goes beyond collaboration, providing timely and efficient solutions that evolve with industry needs. Our offerings include consulting, assessments, implementations, integrations, migrations, and training. These accreditations and services ensure that Adaptavist and GitLab together deliver comprehensive and relevant DevOps solutions to our customers.

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About BetaNXT

BetaNXT powers the future of connected wealth management infrastructure solutions, leveraging real-time data capabilities to enhance the wealth advisor experience. Combining industry expertise with the power of its proven Beta, Maxit, and Mediant businesses, it is focused on solving customers' most demanding integration challenges with flexible, efficient, connected solutions that anticipate their changing needs. Its comprehensive approach reduces enterprise costs, streamlines operations processes, increases advisor productivity, and enhances investor experiences.

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