SimCorp has undertaken a fundamental overhaul of its technology platform to support AI at scale, centering its strategy on a clear principle: migrate data rather than replicate legacy environments. Instead of simply moving existing customer configurations, the company rebuilt them within a standardized software-as-a-service architecture on Microsoft Azure, transferring data and integrations through carefully managed transitions. This approach embeds governance by design, maintaining consistency across regions, tenants, and regulatory frameworks.
According to Ulrik Elstrup Hansen, Senior Vice President and Chief Platform Technologist at SimCorp, the transformation was driven by foundational requirements as well as cloud adoption. The company prioritized built-in governance, predictable operations, and the ability to support AI without introducing new control risks. By defining these principles early, SimCorp aimed to create a platform capable of scaling securely amid increasingly complex regulatory requirements.
At the core of the new SimCorp One platform is a modular tenant architecture that replaces environment-level customization with standardized building blocks. Each customer environment is built from a common codebase, with differentiation achieved by selecting and combining application modules rather than through bespoke configuration. This model enables SimCorp to deliver SaaS at scale, control operational risk, and maintain consistency in deployment and governance practices.
Nicholas Prietzmann, a lead architect at SimCorp, emphasized that consistency in tenant construction is key to scalability. By standardizing modules instead of creating fully bespoke environments, the company reduces complexity and improves reliability. The result is a platform in which variations are controlled and predictable, supporting both efficiency and compliance.
Microsoft Azure serves as the control plane underlying this architecture, providing centralized identity management, logging, monitoring, and security controls across all regions. This unified platform enables SimCorp to meet local regulatory requirements without redesigning its governance mechanisms for each market. To ensure consistent workload execution worldwide, the company standardized on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), enabling scalable production deployments while avoiding configuration drift.
Prietzmann noted that adopting AKS was a deliberate decision to simplify operations without turning the platform itself into an additional operational burden. By using managed services, SimCorp can focus on application delivery rather than infrastructure maintenance, further improving scalability.
Platform infrastructure, application services, configurations, and integrations are deployed through automated workflows, ensuring consistency and reproducibility. This deployment-as-code approach accelerates rollouts across regions and strengthens operational discipline. Hansen emphasized that for a regulated financial platform, transparency is more than an operational advantage: it is a prerequisite for auditability and trust, underscoring the broader strategic importance of the transformation.