A high-performance, green and French cloud solution: an important issue for Natixis.

At Natixis, which is a large French bank, we have trading activities. So we have several trading rooms that correspond to several asset classes: equities, interest rates, commodities... And all of these trading activities carried out by our traders need to be monitored, whether in terms of valuation, risk control, etc. This gives rise to the production of a set of reports which are quite substantial and these reports are based on massive compute which of course use a whole set of valuation models which are specific to Natixis or standard for some.
This means that we have a large volume of trades for which we need to have reports to monitor the activity of our traders.
And this turns into a huge computer activity, in the form of compute.

For a very long time, we had internal computing farms on which we spent huge volumes of CPU hours. And we made the transition to the cloud, particularly at Qarnot, some time ago. The advantage of the cloud is, of course, to ensure elasticity. You have to know that when you have a computer park, you are constrained by the maximum size of the computing grid. So we may have to deal with limits and we won't be able to handle a load that is greater than normal. With the regulatory requirements coming up and increasing every year, we need the elasticity that the cloud provides.

We are extremely aware of our ecological responsibility since we have to maximize the use of our computing grids and at the same time reduce their cost and ecological impact. This is the context in which our partnership with Qarnot is taking place.
For a large bank, computer compute means controlling what happens in a portfolio in relation to variations in financial market risks. The number of hours of compute that we spend per week is significant. It's hundreds of thousands of hours, even over a million hours.
And at the same time, there are Green IT initiatives that are very pushy in the company and that ask us what we are doing. All the initiatives are converging towards reducing the expenditure of money, of course, but also energy. And as a result, we are rationalizing our use of computer farms. We are starting to develop green financial products. It would be particularly funny if we were to process green financial products on non-green computing grids.

With Qarnot, technically, we know that it works and that it's a good green IT use case. This is extremely important, both internally and externally. And it's a French company and that's extremely important too. The fact that we have a company that provides us with a high-performance, green cloud solution that is French is very important to us.

"For Qarnot, working with Natixis is an extremely motivating challenge. The challenge for us is to keep our initial mission of reducing our carbon footprint, but above all to provide a high-performance, efficient IT offering and the most appropriate service possible.
From an IT point of view, our service must not be less efficient or robust than what can be found in Gafam, otherwise, banks like Natixis would not be interested" explains Paul Benoit, President and co-founder of Qarnot.