Context

The client wished to become more competitive within the FX (foreign currency exchange) trading sector.

Problem

A series of home-made pricing, quoting, order management and post trade routing systems were reaching the end of their useful lifespan.  These legacy systems were a series of monolithic components communicating via shared memory services on a single host machine, severely limiting the possibility for increased parallel pricing, quoting and order processing. As a result the pricing offered to the bank's clients was often "near market" which lead to uncompetitive prices, lower than expected trading volumes and occasional trading losses.  The java technology used in these systems was not mainstream and some implementation patterns were too opaque and brittle to allow any significant performance improvements.

Solution

After discussions with several business stakeholders, we advised that the client should explore commoditized trading system offerings from reputable vendors.  The client then engaged in an RfP process with a shortlist of prospective vendors, resulting in the selection of a cloud-based trading solution.

We then provided a series of architectural artifacts in the form of static component and dynamic sequence diagrams to support the client's wider integration roadmap. The client then instructed us to develop and deliver several key integration component adapters written in Java Spring Boot running as scalable containerized applications in the following use cases:

• CID Lookup services to ensure Swiss banking secrecy compliance
• Post Trade integration with mid office position keeping systems
• Configuration UI and adapter (to compensate for shortfalls in the vendor platform's own configuration UI's)
• Archiving services for compliance
• Client order life-cycling logging services
• Market data capture for analytics use cases
• A mission critical Indicative pricing service for non-trading use cases such as bank tellers and cash machines

Measurable Impact

Migrating to a commoditized trading platform lead to a 200% daily increase in profitability for the client's FX department. This gain is attributed to improved pricing, quoting and order latencies leading to more attractive pricing and ultimately higher client trading volumes.

Context

The client, a major issuer for Amex, Visa and Mastercard credit card products in Switzerland, was lacking a credible mobile application for their customers. The client therefore was willing to invest in a new mobile platform.

Problem

A previous in-house attempt at a mobile app resulted in a poor user experience with limited functionality. The client then engaged with a major Swiss mobile applications development software house to provide the mobile app end user experience desired, but the project plan lacked a proper integration roadmap and the appropriate solution architecture needed for the data interactions with the mobile front-end.

Solution

We provided a number of roadmaps and subsequent solution architecture proposals to allow the mobile platform investment to be fully exploited.

Our deliverables were:

• Defining the architecture behind a variety of mobile app notification events triggered by individual credit card purchase activities
• Applying a consistent customer view of card and customer events to allow efficient implementation and troubleshooting across two (or more) partner mobile platforms
• Introducing an enterprise-wide canonical event type catalogue, initially “purchase authorisation”, “loyalty offer” and “balance alert” event types
• Designing notification internal event streams that
  • were consumed by internal systems and external partners alike and in a consistent (ordered) manner
  • were decoupled in operation to prevent impediment of other stream’s liveliness or throughput
  • were sufficiently coherent to allow cross-stream functionality (data analysis, filtering, wiretapping, windowing)
• Ensuring that all solution aspects are designed comply with the relevant security standards (OWASP, PCI-DSS)

Measurable Impact

Our efforts were a significant contribution to the client's stated goals of

• reducing the call–center voice workload by 25% by the end of the fiscal year
• double within 6 months the current 70,000-strong mobile app user base
• Attract new customers and increase card products upselling
• Empower the customer to self-serve at the customer’s convenience and engage the customer through personalised, direct in-app notifications
• Show the same information to the customer as seen by the call center (e.g. available spend, recent card activity)

Context

The client, a tier 1 Swiss Bank, wished to bring FX pricing and execution management in-house from an on-premise vendor solution to gain cost savings and greater product control.

Problem

Over a number of years the vendor had established a tight binding to the client's change and run cycles for an important vendor-supplied FX software application. The vendor wrote, deployed and managed the application on the client's premises. The client began to feel uncomfortable about the single-vendor dependency. The client felt that they had sufficient resources in-house to be able to at least run the application themselves.

Solution

After using our services model, we and the client determined that it would be feasible to replace the vendor solution with one jointly developed by the client and us. Rewriting the pricing capabilities were then given to Upton Consulting, with the quoting and order capture capabilities developed in-house by the client's internal development team.

We provided the following components

• FX and Precious Metals price engine, including cross computation and tenor calculations for standard tenors out to 10 years
• Money market price engine for short and long term deposits and loans, for standard tenors out to 10 years
• A value date service to provide accurate value dates for standard tenors and broken dates

Measurable Impact

The migration from an on-premise vendor solution to an in-house solution saved the client approximately 2.5 million swiss francs annually in licensing and consultancy fees 

Software Solutions:

Tier 1 Swiss Bank: Money Market Pricing Engine (complex event processor)
Tier 1 Swiss Bank: FX pricing engine(complex event processor)
Tier 1 Swiss Bank: FX post trade routing system (complex event processor)
Tier 1 Swiss Bank: Equities/Fixed Income Order routing application
Tier 1 Swiss Bank: FX Order processing application
Tier 1 Swiss Bank: Market Risk Completeness application
Tier 1 Swiss Bank: HNWI/UHNWI Managed Fund application
Tier 1 Swiss Bank: Investment Research Document Publishing application
Tier 1 Swiss Bank: Intranet Website Migration utility
Tier 1 Swiss Bank: Public Internet Redesign
Tier 1 Swiss Bank: Private Banking Y2K worldwide site status monitoring application
UK Forensic Accounting Specialis: Swiss Dormant Accounts Forensic Accounting application
Tier 2 UK Bank: Discretionary Money Management
Tier 2 UK Bank: Derivatives Quarterly Cashflow application
Australian Asset Manager: various applications supporting the HiPortfolio general ledger

Infrastructure Consultancy

Future Watch International Recruiting: Small business networking infrastructure
Peritus Investment Consultancy: Small business networking infrastructure