High Availability Infrastructure and CI/CD Pipeline Automation for a Swiss Wealth Management FinTech

About the Client

The client is a Swiss FinTech company operating in the wealth management sector — building software solutions for financial advisors, asset managers, and private banking clients. Their platform handles sensitive financial data for high-net-worth individuals and institutions, operating under Swiss financial regulation and GDPR data protection requirements.

As a regulated financial services technology provider, the client’s infrastructure reliability directly impacts their clients’ ability to serve their own end customers. Outages, deployment failures, and instability in the platform are not just internal technical problems — they are client-facing incidents with regulatory and reputational consequences. The client name is kept confidential under NDA.

The Infrastructure Challenge

Many FinTech startups build their initial infrastructure pragmatically — prioritizing speed to market over resilience, using manual deployment processes that work well enough when the team is small and releases are infrequent. As the platform matures and client expectations rise, that infrastructure becomes a liability:

• Manual deployment processes introduced human error risk — a misconfiguration during a production deployment could cause an outage affecting live client portfolios
• No high availability architecture meant a single component failure could take the entire platform offline — unacceptable for a financial services environment where clients expect continuous availability
• The absence of automated testing in the deployment pipeline meant defects could reach production without systematic validation — increasing the risk of client-facing incidents
• Development velocity was constrained by the manual deployment bottleneck — engineers could build faster than the deployment process could keep up with, creating a backlog of unreleased changes
• GDPR and Swiss financial regulation required demonstrable controls over the infrastructure environment — documentation, access controls, and audit trails that manual processes made difficult to produce consistently

Solution Architecture

Propelex designed the solution across two interconnected layers — the high availability infrastructure layer and the CI/CD automation layer — ensuring both worked together as an integrated system rather than two separate implementations:

High Availability Design

The HA architecture was designed to eliminate single points of failure across every layer of the infrastructure stack:

CI/CD Pipeline Automation

The automated pipeline covers the complete software delivery lifecycle from code commit to production deployment:

• Commit trigger — every code commit to the Git repository automatically triggers the TeamCity build pipeline, eliminating the manual build initiation step entirely
• Automated build — TeamCity compiles the application, resolves dependencies, runs unit tests, and produces deployment artifacts — all without human intervention and with full build history and artifact versioning
• Automated testing — integration tests and validation checks run automatically as part of the pipeline, catching defects before they reach staging or production environments
• Staged deployment via GoCD — GoCD manages promotion through environments (development → staging → production) with configurable approval gates that balance automation speed with the control requirements of a regulated financial services environment
• Production deployment — approved changes deploy to the Rancher-managed production environment automatically, with rollback capability configured for immediate recovery from deployment failures
• Deployment visibility — full pipeline visibility for engineering and operations teams — every deployment is tracked, timestamped, and auditable, supporting both operational troubleshooting and compliance documentation requirements

The Results

Key Takeaway

For FinTech platforms operating in regulated environments, infrastructure resilience and deployment reliability are not engineering nice-to-haves — they are client promises. A wealth management platform that goes down during market hours, or that deploys a defect to production because the deployment process lacked automated validation, is not just experiencing a technical failure. It is breaking a commitment to the financial advisors and institutions that depend on the platform to serve their clients.

The VSphere, Rancher, TeamCity, and GoCD stack that Propelex delivered gives this Swiss FinTech the infrastructure foundation to make those commitments confidently — with the resilience to absorb component failures without service interruption, and the pipeline automation to deliver improvements continuously without the risk that manual processes introduce.