Increased production releases from 2,000 to nearly 50,000 annually
Enabled full team autonomy from development through to production
Provided the technical foundation and scalability required for expansion into new markets
Enabled over 90% of teams to reach high or elite DevOps performance as measured by DORA
Nordnet rebuilt its core infrastructure on Google Cloud to accelerate innovation, enhance customer personalization, and scale securely across regions. By replatforming instead of lifting and shifting, Nordnet empowered its engineering teams, increased deployment speed, and created the foundation to enter new markets.
Nordnet rebuilt its core infrastructure on Google Cloud to accelerate innovation, enhance customer personalization, and scale securely across regions. By replatforming instead of lifting and shifting, Nordnet empowered its engineering teams, increased deployment speed, and created the foundation to enter new markets.
Rebuilding a bank in the cloud
Google Cloud showed a genuine commitment to making sure we succeeded in our transformation.
Elias Lindholm
Chief Technology Officer, Nordnet
Managing money online is now second nature for most consumers. But long before online banking went mainstream, Nordnet was already leading the way. Founded in 1996, the Swedish digital savings and investments platform was one of the first to offer online trading and savings tools in the Nordics. Three decades on, the company continues to innovate.
"What really defines Nordnet is our entrepreneurial spirit. We continuously seek to innovate and push our offer forward," says Elias Lindholm, Chief Technology Officer at Nordnet. "Our goal is to help people succeed with their savings and investments by offering everything they need through our digital platform. We have no physical branches, so technology is at the core of everything we do."
Three decades of operations, however, meant Nordnet was working with several generations of legacy technology. "We realized that to stay competitive and continue to innovate at a high pace, we needed to realign our architecture with the needs we have today, notably better time-to-market, greater scalability, and improved security," Lindholm explains.
The company embarked on an ambitious replatforming project, opting against a lift-and-shift approach in favor of rebuilding each application as cloud-native from the ground up. To do this, Nordnet turned to Google Cloud. "Google Cloud showed a genuine commitment to making sure we succeeded in our transformation," says Lindholm.
Enabling innovation at scale
One thing we really appreciate with Google Cloud is all of the managed services, which enable us to focus on building products that our customers love and less on building and maintaining infrastructure.
Elias Lindholm
Chief Technology Officer, Nordnet
The team began the transformation by replatforming on premises, but progress was slow. "A couple of years into that journey, we realized we were spending more time building and maintaining infrastructure than we were replatforming the business services we wanted to," Lindholm explains. That realization prompted a shift to the cloud, where the team could experiment faster and spin up infrastructure in a fraction of the time. Google Cloud offered the right foundation: a flexible, scalable platform with powerful managed services.
The aim was to create a holistic architecture for Nordnet's applications by defining clearer boundaries between them, enabling the reuse of shared capabilities and simplifying integration.
The team focused on enabling rapid progress by designing a development environment where teams could begin building on the new platform early, even as core services were still being rearchitected. The goal was to maximize momentum and avoid bottlenecks by making shared capabilities accessible through APIs from the start.
NordnetX ("NNX"), the resulting platform, is a microservice-based architecture aligned around Nordnet's business domains. Each domain exposes well-defined APIs, using a REST architecture for synchronous communication and Pub/Sub for asynchronous, event-driven messaging. The system is designed for modularity and scalability, with a strong emphasis on managed services. Key components include Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) for container orchestration, Cloud SQL as the standardized storage layer, and BigQuery and Looker for analytics and business intelligence.
"One thing we really appreciate with Google Cloud is all of the managed services, which enable us to focus on building products that our customers love and less on building and maintaining infrastructure," Lindholm says.
Modernizing security, empowering teams, and enhancing customer experience
The migration enabled a complete overhaul of the company's security model. Nordnet is now building a zero-trust architecture on Google Cloud, which would have been nearly impossible to achieve with its previous infrastructure. "Building that type of infrastructure is very complex, and something we would never have been able to do ourselves," Lindholm explains. With infrastructure-as-code and integrated services like DDoS protection and geo-IP filtering, the team now has the control and flexibility to respond to threats in real time.
Nordnet has also seen substantial benefits across speed, scalability, and stability.
Before Google Cloud, that level of personalization just wouldn't have been possible. We wouldn't have the tools or infrastructure, even at a lower scale.
Elias Lindholm
Chief Technology Officer, Nordnet
Annual production deployments increased from around 2,000 to nearly 50,000. Platform availability has improved considerably, and over 90% of engineering teams now rank as "high" or "elite" performers on the DORA metrics, a set of industry-standard benchmarks that measure software delivery performance.
Enhancing the customer experience was one of the major drivers of the transformation. The company is currently working to improve personalized recommendations on Shareville, its social investment community. Using BigQuery as the data science layer and Looker for business intelligence, Nordnet now provides each of the company's 2.2 million customers with a custom feed that includes relevant news, corporate actions, and insights. "Before Google Cloud, that level of personalization just wouldn't have been possible. We wouldn't have the tools or infrastructure, even at a lower scale," Lindholm says.
Since the migration, Lindholm has observed a significant mindset shift among the company's tech teams. "The cloud migration has given our engineering teams true autonomy. For the first time, they can independently build, test, and deploy without relying on other departments," he says. "That's been a real breakthrough for many of our engineers. Early on in the process, there was a bit of resistance. But now, the same people who once said, 'we just want to focus on the application layer,' are saying they can't imagine going back to a time when they had no control over their own delivery."
Looking toward a fully cloud-based future
There's no question that without the migration to Google Cloud, we wouldn't have had the confidence to scale and grow the way we have. Entering new markets is a big step, but the cloud migration gave us the technical foundation and customer offering to do it, and that's amazing.
Elias Lindholm
Chief Technology Officer, Nordnet
In addition to replatforming its own services, the company is accelerating SaaS adoption to ensure all third-party applications are also cloud native. Nordnet currently hosts most services in Google's cloud region located in Finland. While this setup supports their Nordic footprint well, the team is actively exploring a move to a multi-regional architecture, with Sweden as the next likely region. Being able to operate across multiple regions not only strengthens security but also provides peace of mind that critical services can be maintained or restored quickly in the face of any external disruptions. "The flexibility of being able to host our services or move our operations anywhere Google Cloud has an availability zone is one of its major strengths," Lindholm says.
The company is preparing to expand beyond the Nordics, with Germany set to launch next year.
"There's no question that without the migration to Google Cloud, we wouldn't have had the confidence to scale and grow the way we have," Lindholm says. "Entering new markets is a big step, but the cloud migration gave us the technical foundation and customer offering to do it, and that's amazing."
Founded in 1996, Nordnet is a leading Nordic digital bank that aims to democratize investments and savings through a user-friendly, innovation-driven online platform.
Industry: Financial Services
Location: Sweden
Products: Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), BigQuery, Cloud SQL, Looker, Pub/Sub
