One of the world’s largest financial services enterprises, the company operates across North America, Europe, Africa and APAC. Their footprint spans major financial centers, market exchanges, offices and data centers, making resilient global connectivity fundamental to daily operations.
The company cannot be named publicly, but their environment, requirements and the business value delivered illustrate the connectivity needs of large financial institutions. Application access, trading connectivity and business continuity all depend on highly resilient network design.
Read more about financial services connectivity.
Connectivity is a business continuity requirement – not simply an IT requirement. The organization depends on reliable access to data, cloud platforms, internal data centers, financial market exchanges and latency-sensitive applications. These connections support their trading and customer operations.
Their services must connect users, platforms and applications across a distributed global footprint. This includes cloud provider environments such as AWS and Azure, the company’s own data centers and exchange locations. Because any disruption can have an immediate operational impact, diversity, redundancy and route transparency are central to the network design.
The company’s target is effectively 100% service availability across the overall solution. Individual circuits may come from multiple providers, but the combined architecture must work as a whole. If one route, provider or access path is affected, the remaining services must continue to carry the required traffic.
To achieve this, they often need several circuits for the same service, with diverse paths into primary and backup data centers. In some scenarios, each endpoint also needs alternative access routes. Together, these requirements create a complex design challenge across geography, infrastructure, providers and building entry points.
Meeting these requirements takes more than a standard quote. Proposed routes need detailed engineering review and must be adapted to the company’s wider resiliency model. KMZ route files give them the details needed to examine paths down to street level and assess building entrance diversity.
The solution must also meet specific technical requirements, including Layer 2 transparency, jumbo frame support and high-capacity connectivity. These requirements are particularly important in financial services environments where application performance, data movement and operational resilience depend on predictable network behavior.
Arelion supports the company with a combination of Wavelengths and Ethernet Private Line services. Each service is selected to match the technical requirements, location and diversity objectives. Bandwidths range from 1G to 10G and 100G, with 400G opportunities now being explored.
Arelion’s Ethernet network supports 9400 MTU, while Wavelengths support 9600 MTU. This gives the company flexibility across both service types. Where their resiliency design calls for it, Ethernet can also be delivered with static routing, allowing it to behave similarly to a wavelength service.
Arelion works closely with the company to review topology, route diversity, access options and technical constraints – not simply offer a standard route and price. This collaborative design process is where the value lies. Where Arelion’s own backbone path does not provide the diversity their target architecture requires, a carefully selected third-party segment can be added to complete the design. Read more about our global network.
Every circuit needs to fit the company’s broader multi-provider resiliency strategy. Arelion helps them achieve this through a collaborative design process, providing the route transparency, responsiveness and engineering flexibility needed to align each connection with the wider network.
The relationship has grown over more than seven years of close cooperation. By combining route diversity, service flexibility and responsive engineering support, Arelion has become a trusted connectivity partner for highly resilient financial services networking.
For the company, the overall architecture supports the availability required for mission-critical applications and market connectivity. The customized design helps prevent an issue affecting one path or provider from becoming a wider service interruption.
The company values Arelion’s ability to engage beyond a standard sales process, especially when route engineering, diversity validation and rapid responsiveness are required. This approach has helped strengthen confidence and expand the relationship over time.
The business with this customer has grown year over year, typically by 10–20%. The strength of the relationship has also opened discussions around additional services, including IP connectivity, which the customer had not previously considered with Arelion.
The company is increasing their use of AI across analytics, client platforms and support operations. As a result, demand for resilient, high-capacity connectivity is expected to keep growing. Arelion’s scalable services, transparent route design and collaborative delivery model position it to support that evolution. Explore AI networking here.
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