KBC Securities Services, a division of KBC Group NV, is Belgium’s leading provider of integrated securities solutions. From its headquarters in Brussels, the company supports a broad client base - including banks, broker-dealers, wealth managers, financial institutions, and registered funds - with end-to-end services in global brokerage, custody, portfolio management, and regulatory compliance.

As part of its strategic focus, KBC Securities Services continually invests in technological innovation to maintain operational excellence in an increasingly complex financial environment. With digital platforms such as Securities Services Online (SSO) and Neon, the company ensures real-time visibility, secure access, and transparent reporting for its clients. However, even with this advanced infrastructure, the organization faced a growing challenge: managing surging transaction volumes within fixed processing windows.

"By initiating 50 parallel jobs within Sitemule Enterprise and applying multithreading at a factor of 200, the system achieved an effective throughput of 10,000 concurrent processing tasks."

The Challenge: Volume at Scale

By 2024, system performance during peak transaction periods had become a critical bottleneck. Software engineers Bavo Criegers and Jo Lemahieu were tasked with ensuring that up to 20 million clearing transactions could be processed within an eight-hour window - without compromising reliability or data integrity.

These transactions were running on an IBM i model 42G-EP5G in a secured, mirrored environment. Traditional performance enhancement methods - including tuning, job scheduling, and even the consideration of a hardware upgrade - proved insufficient. As the team evaluated options, it became clear that investing in a larger IBM i server would only defer the problem, not solve it.

The Solution: Sitemule Enterprise

The turning point came when the team decided to implement Sitemule Enterprise - a solution designed to fully exploit the potential of the IBM i’s ILE (Integrated Language Environment) architecture. Unlike traditional approaches that required significant changes to applications or infrastructure, Sitemule Enterprise offered a native performance optimization layer with multithreaded job balancing.

By initiating 50 parallel jobs within Sitemule Enterprise and applying multithreading at a factor of 200, the system achieved an effective throughput of 10,000 concurrent processing tasks. As a result, KBC Securities Services reached a sustained capacity of 2.5 million transactions per hour - exceeding its peak requirements while retaining stability, accuracy, and compliance.

"The transformation was executed within hours, with existing IBM i applications reused entirely - delivering instant scalability and zero operational disruption."

Implementation and Impact

The transformation was executed within a matter of hours. No legacy applications needed to be rewritten. The existing IBM i programs were fully reused, capitalizing on Sitemule Enterprise’s seamless integration with the system’s native architecture. Better still, the solution offered a scalable model: additional processing capacity could be added by simply spinning up more jobs, without linear increases in system load or performance degradation.

Business Benefits

• Dramatic increase in transaction throughput without new hardware investment

• Preservation of legacy systems, minimizing cost and risk

• Rapid deployment with zero disruption to ongoing operations

• Future scalability for peak processing periods or business expansion

• Enhanced IT agility, supporting faster response times to business demands
  
  

Conclusion

With Sitemule Enterprise, KBC Securities Services not only solved a pressing performance issue  - it laid the foundation for future-proof, scalable transaction processing. The solution demonstrated that innovation does not always require replacing core systems. By fully leveraging the capabilities of IBM i and ILE, Sitemule Enterprise empowered KBC to meet today’s demands and tomorrow’s challenges with confidence and efficiency.

In a financial industry defined by speed, accuracy, and regulatory pressure, KBC’s decision to deploy Sitemule Enterprise underscores the value of innovative modernization: strategic, targeted, and results-driven.