Case Studies

MUSI: Successful business expansion thanks to smooth implementation of Murex using Formicary? Connect

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 12:39:25 GMT

“Formicary provided a first class team to support MUSI in their implementation of a major new trading system. Formicary’s level of commitment and dedication to the task ensure the highest level of excellence, while also being one of the most dependable and supportive teams we have worked with. Formicary have succeeded in delivering their promise of full quality solutions”.

Stephen Irons, Vice President, Technology

Mitsubishi UFJ Securities International plc

Company Profile

Mitsubishi UFJ Securities International plc (“MUSI”) is the English-incorporated European hub of the global securities and investment banking business of Mitsubishi UFJ Securities Co. Ltd, which itself is part of the Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, the biggest financial institution in the world. MUSI is based in the City of London with branches in Frankfurt, Milan and Zurich. It is active in most areas of the international capital markets, with specialities in debt, equity, derivatives and structured products.

Background

The team’s essential requirements were the ability to view a list of open positions and update the market value from any number of pricing sources, either from market data vendors such as Bloomberg and Reuters or using internal pricing sources. Authorised users needed to be able to access, manipulate and validate all data and export it to the trading system in order to calculate an accurate value of the bank’s P&L.

Solution

In 2008, post Mitsubishi Securities International (MSI) and UFJ merger in London, the organisation’s business plan was then to focus on Business Expansion. This expansion was to be achieved by increasing current trading volumes across the major business areas, as well as the introduction of new trading business such as Inflation Trading and hybrid products. To support this expansion, a project called MUSIC-IR( MUSI Corporate Infrastructure Reinforcement) was initiated. One of the objectives for the project is to investigate various strategic options and implement a strategic platform.

Business Requirement

The ultimate aim of this project is to implement a cross-asset front to back trading functionality within a highly integrated operational infrastructure. The focus throughout will be on delivering key improvements to the business, which included:

• Cross-asset deals capture system

• Data warehousing for reference static, market and transaction data

• Near-time risk and PL functionality

• User-interactive valuation and risk platform

• Optimal STP, front to back

• Consolidate business functions and processes within a single strategic system

Technically, the new system needs to provide:

• De-coupled architecture

• Support Rapid Change

• Transparent, Flexible and Scaleable Architecture

Solution & Approach

Together with the team led by internal MUSI staff, Formicary helped to deliver a strategic system plan which included evaluating third party vendors, internal systems, processes and functions. The new plan outlined a strategic system for supporting the cross-assets deal capturing systems that support STP front to back, which is Murex.

In order to avoid disruption of the existing day-to-day business activities during the implementation, a phased roll-out approach was deployed to provide evolution changes to the existing architecture landscape at MUSI. To realise this vision, Formicary Connect was deployed. Formicary Connect enables disparate systems to connect and communicate using a suite of interoperable components consisting of plug-in modules and connectors. These can be used alone or in combination to route and transform the data flow. This in turn automates and simplifies the flow of trade data reducing the amount of manual input and associated costs.

The project is phased over two years to individual business units. At each phase, all existing trades are migrated, reconciled, legacy systems are decommissioned and new processes and overnight batch runs are introduced.

Achievements

MUSI now has a single front to back cross-asset trading platform that is seamlessly integrated with key existing systems. The architecture allows any of these systems to be modified or replaced without creating a major impact to the business. This is a two years project and the key achievements of Formicary are:

• Hundreds of thousands of trades have been migrated

• Integrated platform for the Exotic Group to develop customised pricing models in any technology e.g. Microsoft .NET or Sun Java

• Consolidated Market data hub for accurate Profit & Loss reporting

• Murex has been rolled out to Hong Kong and other satellite offices globally

• Globally there are hundreds of users working off this platform

• Built custom interface to externally price a new class of exotic instruments, equity hybrids using Flex API

About Formicary

Formicary is an information technology company that specialises in building integrated applications/solutions to maximise business efficiency and streamline business processes for the Financial Services industry.

Formicary has offices in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. For more information, contact us at: info@formicary.net

RiskSeer? at WestLB AG

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:21:09 GMT

Case Study

“Formicary consistently provides us the reliability, commitment and professional services which can be counted on during the ups and downs of projects”

Dr Gerd Börker, Head of IT Trading, WestLB AG

Company

WestLB is a €290 billion international bank employing around 6,000 people in 35 different locations worldwide. WestLB offer a full range of products and services, focusing on lending, structured and project finance, capital markets, asset management, transaction services and real estate finance.

Background

WestLB had a number of trading, risk and settlement systems across multiple business areas and wanted to increase efficiency by streamlining operations and achieving straight-through-processing from front to back office. In order to meet this initiative, the bank chose to reduce the number of disparate applications in use placing particular emphasis on one single trading system.

As a result the application that was in use for securities was replaced. Whilst the new system met the goal for straight-through-processing, it did not have the same functionality that the Risk Management team required to gather and process end-of-day pricing data.

Requirements

Solution

WestLB chose to use Formicary’s RiskSeer™, which delivered an out of the box solution that integrated seamlessly with the new trading system, market data sources and internal applications. RiskSeer™ also provided an API toolkit ensuring it could be quickly and easily customised to meet specific requirements.

By working closely with the Risk Management team, Formicary was able to further identify areas of improvement that were above and beyond the capability of the previous application including automation of manual processes, market valuation on demand and transparency. All actions in RiskSeer™ are audited ensuring clear and concise monitoring of data and easy, accurate reporting.

“RiskSeer™ has given WestLB a faster, more accurate, transparent and audit proven end-of-day process where operational risk is minimised. It dramatically reduces the time required to calculate P&L whilst a global rollout provides a clear view of the bank’s market value and risk exposure on demand.”

Regina Marinina, Head of Risk Engineering London, WestLB AG

Benefits of RiskSeer

· Streamlines end-of-day pricing processes

· Gives authorised users a clear view of open positions on demand

· Offers market conformity checks to monitor when set tolerance levels have been broken

· Facilitates full audit history meeting FSA and other regulatory requirements

About Formicary

Formicary has offices in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. For more information, contact us at: info@formicary.net

Commerzbank select Formicary for systems consolidation and integration

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:21:22 GMT

Case Study

EuroHypo is Europe’s largest institution specialising in financing real-estate and public sector projects and a leading provider of commercial structured finance. Since the takeover of EuroHypo, Commerzbank is Germany’s second largest bank and one of the leading banks in Europe. Its consolidated balance sheet total stands at €608bn. Approximately 36,000 employees look after more than 8 million customers worldwide.

Following the acquisition of EuroHypo, Commerzbank’s strategy was to consolidate trade data by integrating EuroHypo’s trade portfolio, stored in Sungard’s Front Arena, into Commerzbank’s existing trading system, Misys Summit.

The specification was to migrate EuroHypo’s trade portfolio whilst maintaining the existing risk management and settlement functionality. Customised feeds were therefore required between Commerzbank systems and the existing EuroHypo applications. In addition, new risk reporting functionality was required to ensure continuity between the environments.

Together with the team at Commerzbank, Formicary helped in leading the development of the three principal sections of the project: Trade migration, Downstream system feeds and Risk reporting.

The existing EuroHypo Treasury portfolio consisted of thousands of trades so the data first had to be analysed to ensure the cleanest possible representation in Summit while maintaining all necessary trade customisations and extensions. In addition, much of the portfolio was structured, which presented the added challenge of representing highly customised cash flow schedules.

Formicary consultants wrote a trade migration application to migrate the vast majority of the trade portfolio automatically, in the most efficient manner possible with comprehensive logging and error reporting. Complex and highly structured cash flow schedules were represented as trades in Summit using custom built product extensions.

Formicary developed a comprehensive risk reporting facility, customised for the EuroHypo trade portfolio. Given the structured nature of the deals, EuroHypo have highly specialised risk reporting requirements. These reporting conventions had to be maintained from Summit, to ensure continuity for EuroHypo Risk Management.
A risk reporting utility was developed, allowing for customised PV and risk calculations. For example, Delta, Gamma, and Vega can be calculated by using proprietary curve shifting methods already in use at EuroHypo.

To deliver new deals to existing back office infrastructure, Formicary provided EuroHypo with feeds from Summit to their existing settlements and accounting system, SAP. While the main trading system was integrated into Commerzbank’s platform, the new trade, price and risk feeds were able to integrate Summit seamlessly into EuroHypo’s existing infrastructure, minimising operational risk and unnecessary disruption.

Formicary provided Commerzbank with end-to-end support in the project, from initial scoping of development requirements, through to implementation, testing and support. Commerzbank and EuroHypo now have a successfully migrated trade population with supporting feeds, allowing their operation to be streamlined with minimal disturbance to their business environment.

Mr Thomas Metzler, Head of Derivatives IT at Commerzbank AG said “Formicary’s dedicated and knowledgeable team have made a significant contribution to the success and timely completion of this business critical project.”

About Formicary

Formicary is an information technology solutions company that specialises in building integrated applications to maximise business efficiency and streamline business processes for the Financial Services industry.

Founded in 2000, Formicary brings together a world class team of talented and dedicated professionals with industry experience and understanding covering front to back office in equities, fixed income and derivatives. This knowledge, coupled with technical excellence ranging from legacy client/server to cutting edge technologies, enables Formicary to offer innovative and sophisticated solutions to help clients improve their productivity and increase their return on investment.

Formicary has offices in Europe, North America and Australia. For more information, please visit www.formicary.net or contact us at info@formicary.net

ChatSeer: A Winning Compliance Solution In Financial Services

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:21:40 GMT

Case Study

“Formicary ChatSeer provides us with an advanced e-discovery solution to easily record and discover all group chat, instant messaging and web conference communications. This helps us comply with changing financial legislation and meet our legal obligations on data retention accurately and quickly.”

Information Risk Manager, Tier One Investment Bank

Company

Our client is the investment banking division of a multinational banking group, with offices in 26 countries and employes over 13,200 people. The banking group has an AA long term credit rating and a balance sheet of over US$1.9 trillion.

Background

Under current legislation and industry regulations governing electronic communication, instant messaging conversations and group chat are now subject to the same stringent regulations and compliance requirements as email. Organisations are required to record and archive all data in a secure, non-repudiation, tamper proof safe storage unit where data can be easily retrieved for audit, compliance and discovery purposes.

At our client, the internal instant messaging group chat application that is currently deployed on every employee’s desk is Parlano’s MindAlign. Microsoft Live Communications Server 2005 (LCS) is the standard mechanism used to connect to external instant messaging networks such as MSN, Yahoo! and AOL. Web conferencing on Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007 is also used for meeting, conference and announcements.

Requirements

Our client was looking for a long term solution for instant messaging (IM), and Group Chat that not only complied with increasing regulations but would also ease the monitoring, auditing and discovery processes.

The system they had in place took IM and group chat data and converts into email format where it could then be emailed to EMC Centera - a secure data storage unit, via a third party email archiving application which met basic compliance, legal discovery and non–repudiation storage requirements for email.

There were a number of issues with this approach:

Group Chat does not translate easily into email format, consequently there was the possibility of data being lost, manipulated or corrupted before it reaches the secure data storage unit
Retrieving accurate meaningful data for discovery and compliance searches was a lengthy, complex and cumbersome task
There was a maximum size on the file transfer limit which meant some attachments sent over instant messaging applications were too large and had to be split
Attachments were not searchable
User groups required data to be retained for different periods of time to comply with either local or industry regulations however the parameters were not configurable

Most recently, Office Live Meeting 2007 was implemented and client had the same requirement to handle its data and attachments while adding case workflow functionality which includes legal hold of data to better manage audit processes.

Challenges

After an internal review with Compliance and Information Records Management Department, a number of key issues were identified, including file transfer limits and accurate data retention. However, each fix added another level of complexity to the system and still involved converting IM and group chat into email format. After conducting a thorough review in the market for the best solution, Formicary was chosen to deliver ChatSeer, the enterprise chat monitoring and compliance tool as a complete solution.

Solution

Formicary’s ChatSeer is comprised of two pieces of software: ChatSeer Exporter and ChatSeer Portal. Data is extracted from the instant messaging application by the ChatSeer Exporter, which identifies the users involved in the chat, the required retention period of the data and any attachments associated with the log. This is then all sent directly to the secure data storage unit.

The ChatSeer Portal then retrieves a copy of new files from the secure data storage unit for analysis and formatting. It notes all users and word occurrence and frequency, including the text in associated attachments. It then gives each message a unique identity before sending the complete data to a dedicated database.

When a search query is run, any returned messages are presented and are sortable by date or relevance and the user has further options to track the entire conversation and view any associated attachments. It also displays the unique identity of the message to enable the user to quickly retrieve the complete file from the secure data storage if required. The user should only ever need to retrieve the original logs for litigation purposes.

Conclusion

ChatSeer was installed with the appropriate Group Chat, Office Live Meeting 2007, LCS 2005 and Centera connectors. The ChatSeer Exporter was also integrated further into their infrastructure by linking it with Microsoft Windows Active Directory. This enabled the use of security group membership information to define message data retention periods. Optimisation was also needed for the integration with Centera to better support native functionality such as clip replication between the production and Disaster Recovery clusters.

ChatSeer enabled our client to fully utilise all IM applications whilst being fully compliant with current regulations. Increasing business efficiency, the advanced search functionality makes required data easily accessible and simple to administrate by authorised users.

About Formicary

Formicary has offices in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. For more information, contact us at: info@formicary.net info@formicary.net

EPiX? Portal sets the standard for online insurance policies for Arch Europe Travel Insurance

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 10:24:25 GMT

Case Study

Formicary Ltd, an IT consultancy firm specialising in providing solutions for the Financial Services industry, today released the latest case study on EPiX™ Portal Solution for Arch Travel Insurance Europe.

Arch Insurance Company (Europe) Ltd (Arch Europe) is a subsidiary of Arch Capital Group Ltd., which provides insurance and reinsurance on a global basis through its operations in Bermuda, the United States, Canada and Europe. Arch Europe was formed in May 2004 to provide a route for Arch customers to access the London insurance market.

The travel underwriting team joined in December 2005 and wished to create multiple web sites to enable their brokers to sell travel insurance online to their clients. All of the sites would be based on a single back-end to ensure maximum coverage with minimal input.

To achieve this initiative, the Arch Europe team needed a progressive solution that was both flexible and robust enough to allow for multiple individually branded sites, all based on a sophisticated yet flexible pricing engine. The solution also needed to be easy to implement and simple to manage, whilst being fast, efficient and scalable, in order to handle the anticipated increase in traffic volumes.

EPiX Portal provided the framework for a complete solution that was fully expandable. It supported the underlying structure, pricing engine and accounting tools, whilst allowing for multiple companies to have their own community sites on top - all of which could be centrally managed by Arch Europe.

The structure of the sites is simple and accessible enabling users to choose from a selection of pre-defined variables to configure the policy; the quote is then calculated using a sophisticated pricing engine. If a user has identified a medical condition, they are then asked to fill in the relevant form which is reviewed by a member of a medical company to ensure it meets their requirements.

Each company/community site is individually tailored in terms of the look and feel to reflect the corporate identity. Policy variables and discounts can also be customised by adding, editing or deleting the appropriate fields.

Brokers have been keen to sign up to this new offering by Arch Europe for a variety of reasons: one, they get newer, better, more efficient and flexible software, two, they can have policy variables easily tailored to create as many policy types as they require, three, they can get Arch Europe to tailor the look and feel of the site and finally they can get Arch Europe to enable any multiple of sub-users to have access to the software, ensuring they too get a larger share of the market.

Several alternatives were shortlisted, but EPiX Portal solution was chosen as the most cost-effective solution due to its ease of use, multiple authorisation levels, the extensibility provided by its community structure and user groups and the overall design flexibility features.

EPiX Portal has provided Arch Europe with a new, easily managed solution that is both scalable and flexible in design. It has allowed Arch Travel Insurance the freedom to make many additions to the portal and they now have 7 main companies or community sites that are in turn used by hundreds of smaller brokers.

Consequently, Arch Europe has been able to provide its brokers with a unique online resource that gives them a competitive edge and helps establish Arch as a key new player in the travel insurance market.

Dipesh Patel, Travel Underwriter, Arch Insurance Company, said "EPiX Portal has provided us with a progressive, scalable and cost effective portal solution which has enabled us to set the standard for online policy issuance in the UK travel insurance arena."

About Formicary

Founded in 2000, Formicary brings together a world class team of talented and dedicated professionals with industry experience covering Unified Communications (particularly Persistent Group Chat) and Cross Asset Trading applications. This knowledge, coupled with technical excellence ranging from legacy client/server to cutting edge technologies, enables Formicary to offer innovative and sophisticated services and software to help clients improve their productivity and increase their return on investment. Formicary has offices in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific.

About Arch Insurance Company (Europe)

Arch Insurance Company (Europe) Ltd (Arch Europe) is a subsidiary of Arch Capital Group Ltd., which provides insurance and reinsurance on a global basis through its operations in Bermuda, the United States, Canada and Europe. Arch Europe was formed in May 2004 to provide a route for Arch customers to access the London insurance market. For further information please refer to www.archinsurance.com.

Simplified Web Solution for Legal Services NYC

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:41:29 GMT

Case Study

Legal Services NYC (LS-NYC) is the largest organisation exclusively devoted to providing free civil legal services in the United States with local offices in every borough of New York City. Made up of attorneys and staff, they provide a comprehensive approach to finding solutions to legal problems of clients – single mothers, workers with disabilities, seniors and others.

They provide high quality free legal help on cases involving housing, family, domestic violence, public benefits, income tax, employment, education, consumer rights and economic development which includes assisting the most vulnerable people in the society such as people who are not receiving child support, victims of domestic violence, AIDS and HIV carriers, and elderly citizens facing eviction and unsafe living conditions.

Previously, LS-NYC had a very limited web presence and relied on a different contractor to create and maintain their website, but lack of web design and limited support proved to be a problem. External vendors with experience in providing to non-profit organisations could not meet LS-NYC’s demands in terms of flexibility, delivery timelines and quality; therefore the requirement was to have a web portal that can be managed in-house.

The web portal required was also to fulfil LS-NYC’s need to be more accessible especially to enable in-house staff to maintain and develop content easily as well as manage accounts, and to serve as an important point of presence to communicate its mission and role to the public; especially for clients, research students, potential recruits, funders and sponsors.

LS-NYC opted for EPiX Portal solution - a unified package for information sharing that integrates easily with existing legacy applications. It has content management, resource management and collaboration tools, and can be extensively personalised to enable LS-NYC to tailor the look and feel of their site to suit their corporate image.

The user-friendly interface allows users with basic computing skills to create their internet, intranet and extranet sites with little assistance. It is totally scalable to accommodate growing numbers of users and new functionality.

Information on the organisation is now more accessible to the public. The web portal also serves as a recruiting tool for potential employees, and donors and sponsors now have something tangible to peruse. LS-NYC now have full control over their web portal and existing staffs are able manage the content on the website anytime, anywhere. EPiX Portal solution offers LS-NYC easy and quick editing functions and future expansion into creating an intranet and extranet sites.

About Formicary

Formicary has offices in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. For more information, contact us at: info@formicary.net

Commerzbank Case Study

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:06:26 GMT

Case Study: Commerzbank

Systems Consolidation and Integration between EuroHypo and Commerzbank AG.