Central securities depository
Issuance, safekeeping, and registry of dematerialised securities, with the book-entry record held as the single source of truth.
Custom software for the financial industry
Software engineered to the standard money is held to.
Highex designs and builds custom software for financial institutions — systems shaped around each client's instruments, regulations, and ways of working. Established in Stockholm in 1999.
About Highex
Building financial software from Stockholm since 1999.
Highex is a Stockholm software firm, established in 1999, that builds custom software for financial institutions. We don't resell a packaged platform — we engineer systems shaped to each client's instruments, regulators, and obligations.
In practice that spans two worlds: the post-trade infrastructure that exchanges, clearing houses, and central depositories run on — depository, clearing, and settlement — and the cross-border, ISO 20022 payment systems behind commercial and correspondent banks.
Custom is the operating principle, not a slogan: every engagement begins from a client's requirements rather than a product roadmap.
See what we build →Capabilities
The infrastructure securities markets run on.
Highex builds the post-trade systems at the centre of securities markets — the depository, clearing, and settlement infrastructure that exchanges, clearing houses, and central depositories operate.
Securities settlement
Delivery-versus-payment and free-of-payment settlement across the securities and cash legs, engineered for compressed settlement cycles.
Clearing & central counterparty
Trade clearing, multilateral netting, novation, and margin and risk management for centrally cleared markets.
Corporate actions & asset servicing
Processing of dividends, coupons, redemptions, and elective events, reconciled against the positions on record.
Collateral & securities lending
Collateral management, repo, and securities-lending workflows with exposure, eligibility, and limit control.
Post-trade connectivity
Messaging and integration over ISO 20022, ISO 15022, and FIX, linking exchanges, members, and depositories.
SWIFT & ISO 20022
Cross-border payments, native to ISO 20022.
Highex builds the bank-to-bank and cross-border payment systems that run over the SWIFT network — not card rails — engineered natively on ISO 20022 and aligned to the network's security rules.
Commercial & correspondent banks
Cross-border payments, nostro/vostro reconciliation, and end-to-end tracking across the correspondent chain.
Central banks & market infrastructures
National high-value systems migrating to ISO 20022, with the cross-border interoperability the network now expects.
Messaging standard
ISO 20022 native
Native MX processing, MT-to-MX translation, and the structured, data-rich messages the CBPR+ guidelines require for cross-border payments and reporting.
Cross-border
Correspondent payments
Correspondent-banking flows and nostro/vostro reconciliation, with end-to-end tracking via a unique transaction reference for real-time status and confirmation of credit.
Security controls
Designed to the CSCF
Connectivity to the network with systems designed to the SWIFT Customer Security Controls Framework, and the artefacts to support your annual CSP attestation.
Financial crime
Screening in the path
Sanctions, PEP, and anti-money-laundering screening embedded in the payment flow, with audit trails for supervisory review.
How we engineer
The engineering principles we work to.
Financial software has a higher floor than most. These are the disciplines we apply as a matter of course.
01
Correctness before everything
A financial system that is fast and wrong is worthless. Every calculation is verifiable, repeatable, and reconciled against an independent source of truth.
Fixed-point and decimal arithmetic for monetary values — never floating point
Double-entry invariants enforced in code: postings balance or they do not commit
Idempotent operations and exactly-once processing across distributed boundaries
Automated reconciliation against the book of record
02
Security as the foundation
Security is the substrate, not a layer added at the end. We minimise trust and make every privileged action observable.
Encryption in transit and at rest, with disciplined key management
Least-privilege access, enforced and audited
Immutable, tamper-evident audit trails for every state change
ISO/IEC 27001-certified information security management
03
Regulatory fitness
Regulation is a design constraint. We build systems whose reports can be reproduced and whose data can be traced.
End-to-end data lineage: reported figures traceable to source events
Time-stamped, replayable transaction records
Segregation of duties and maker-checker controls in sensitive workflows
04
Resilience & continuity
Markets do not pause for outages. We build systems that degrade gracefully and recover predictably.
High availability with defined, tested recovery objectives
Disaster recovery rehearsed on a schedule — proven, not assumed
Circuit breakers and back-pressure to contain cascading failure
Failover testing as a routine part of release assurance
05
Performance & determinism
Predictable latency matters more than peak speed. We engineer for the tail, not the average.
Latency measured at high percentiles, not just the mean
Capacity engineered for peak events, not steady state
Observability by default: structured logging, metrics, and tracing
Deterministic test harnesses that replay realistic conditions
06
Built to be maintained
A system you cannot evolve is a liability. We write software your own teams can own and extend.
Domain-driven design aligned to the business, not the database
Testing that protects behaviour, not line counts
Documentation and knowledge transfer as deliverables
Incremental change — no big-bang rewrites
ISO 9001-certified quality management across delivery
Our approach
Built around you — never around a product.
Every institution carries its own instruments, regulators, and ways of working. We treat those differences as the specification — a custom solution is only worth the name if it fits one client exactly.
The approach
We design to your business
We begin by mapping how you actually work, turning tacit knowledge into a precise, shared specification.
Discovery workshops with your front office, operations, and compliance teams
Co-design alongside your people, so the system speaks your vocabulary
Working prototypes early, so decisions are seen and agreed — not assumed
Flexibility
Solutions that bend to fit
Bespoke does not mean brittle. We build systems that flex as your instruments and rules change.
Business rules, instruments, and limits in configuration your teams can control
Clean APIs that integrate with the estate you already run
Deployed on-premise, or in public or private cloud
Your requirements
Held to what you asked for
Your requirements are the contract. We make them traceable and testable.
Requirements traceability, from first workshop to final acceptance test
Documentation handed over as a deliverable
How we engage
A disciplined path from brief to stewardship.
Custom software is delivered, not bought off a shelf. Our method is designed to remove surprises.
Phase 01
Discovery & architecture
We map your instruments, data, regulators, and constraints before a line is written, and produce a costed plan.
Phase 02
Engineering
We build in short, reviewable increments alongside your teams, with working software demonstrated continuously.
Phase 03
Assurance
Security review, performance testing under load, and a walkthrough that shows the system does what is required.
Phase 04
Stewardship
We hand over documented software and can stay on to run and evolve it.
Fixed-scope delivery
A defined system, a fixed price, a committed date — where requirements are well understood.
Embedded teams
Our engineers integrate into your organisation to raise the standard of delivery from the inside.
Modernisation programmes
Incremental transformation of existing systems, migrated without unplanned downtime.
Who we build for
Institutions that answer to regulators.
The arithmetic is unforgiving across all of them, and each carries its own constraints.
Commercial banks
Stock exchanges
Clearing houses
Switch operators
Central banks
Central depositories
Begin a conversation
Tell us what you need to build.
Share the outline of your problem and we'll respond. Every engagement begins with a conversation, not a sales call.
Stockholm · Head office
Highex
Olof Palmes gata 29, 4 tr · SE-111 22 Stockholm, Sweden
Direct
info@highex.se
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